


darling it's a faded notion

by varnes



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: M/M, Paranormal shenanigans, y'all remember that trope where people can't be more than 5 feet apart without Suffering?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-04
Updated: 2018-09-27
Packaged: 2019-07-06 22:36:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 28,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15895533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/varnes/pseuds/varnes
Summary: The sun is too bright and Ryan’s whole body is alight with something that is eating him all the way up from the inside out, but he keeps his eyes open and he makes himself look, and he tells himself that once he finds Shane, he’ll think about it. Once he finds Shane, they’ll make a plan. Once he finds Shane, and only then, he’ll let himself have the thought he’s been swallowing down like bile since he came to: that they didn’t fall.They were pushed.OR: Ryan and Shane get cursed by a ghost, and now they can't be not-touching. It's ... not great.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I MISS THIS TROPE. BRING BACK THIS TROPE. anyway, i’ve been stuck in an airport all day and want to be dead, so. here you go. no time to check for typos, but the good news is ... i probably wouldn’t check for typos anyway.

Ryan keeps his eyes closed. He thinks maybe he like — has to. Every time he opens them he is flooded with the most extreme pain he’s ever felt in his life, the kind of ferocious, dizzying agony that isn’t burning and isn’t aching and isn’t stabbing but is also, somehow, all three at once. It’s the kind of pain that just exhausts you, making it impossible to do anything about it, because Ryan is sure that if he could just open his eyes, could just push himself to his feet, could just _find Shane_ , then they could figure something out.

Maybe Shane could murder him, for example, and put him out of his misery.

Ryan’s disappointed to learn that he’ll only make it to twenty-nine, but like, he’d rather call it a day on the whole having a body thing then spend one more second in the absolute miserable hell of his entire body being burned/frozen/aching/stabbed.

“Shane,” he manages to say, keeping his eyes squeezed shut. It still hurts like this, blond, but it’s less. It’s — not _bearable_ , exactly, but at least his head is less foggy with it, at least he can string a couple of thoughts together. “Shane, big guy. Are you okay? Are you — ?”

 _Don’t say alive,_ he thinks. _Of course he’s alive._

There’s no answer.

“Shane,” Ryan says again, more firmly. He swallows down the crawl of panic up his throat, the dawning realization that even if — even _when_ Shane answers, even when they find each other, they will still be here, at the bottom of the Grand fucking Canyon, without a guide or a phone or any sense of how to get back to the rim. Ryan had barely known where they were _before_ they’d fallen.

He doesn’t let himself have the next thought, the one that chases on its heel, biting at him. Now isn’t the time to think about it. Now isn’t the time to entertain the possibility. Now isn’t the time for him to say _I told you so_ to Shane, because it’s possible that Shane is —

Ryan opens his eyes. He grits his teeth against the wave of dizzying pain, turning his head to look, to find Shane, who isn’t dead, who _cannot be dead_ , who is just — knocked out, maybe, or woke up and went for help, or isn’t answering Ryan because he ... broke his jaw, or something.

The sun is too bright and Ryan’s whole body is alight with something that is eating him all the way up from the inside out, but he keeps his eyes open and he makes himself look, and he tells himself that once he finds Shane, he’ll think about it. Once he finds Shane, they’ll make a plan. Once he finds Shane, and only then, he’ll let himself have the thought he’s been swallowing down like bile since he came to: that they didn’t fall.

They were pushed.

—

_one day earlier_

To everyone’s surprise, Shane does most of the driving from Phoenix. He insists that they go through Flagstaff, telling them all about how Arizona has six different ecosystems. Ryan is mostly trying not to laugh at how excited Shane is every time they pass a new kind of cactus.

“Look, Ryan, that one’s you,” Shane says instead of answering, pointing a finger at a cluster of short, round boys with pink bulbs on the end. “You’re flowering! I’m proud of you, man. That’s a huge accomplishment.”

Even putting Shane’s enthusiasm for North American topographical diversity aside, the trip starts in a fairly jovial spirit. They’re all in one car, rotating who gets to ride shotgun every time they pull into a scenic view rest stop. Ryan’s pretending not to be keeping track of exactly how many minutes everybody has gotten, but Devon is clearly cheating because she’s been up front as much as Ryan and TJ combined.

“Good stuff, boys,” Mark says flatly, tucking away the handheld with a definitive pat. “Great cactus banter.”

“Is it cactuses or cacti?” Devon asks. “Does anybody know?”

“Cacti,” Ryan tells her, at the same time that TJ says, “Cactuses.”

In the resulting pause, Devon laughs and prompts, “Tour Guide Madej? Any insight, as a tiebreaker?”

Shane shrugs. “Say it however you want,” he says with a grandiose wave of his hand. “Nobody likes a prescriptivist.”

Ryan — who agrees in theory but also wants to be right in practice — rolls his eyes. “Cop out,” he accuses.

“There he is!” TJ cries. “Shane ‘No Opinion’ Madej, the scourge of Buzzfeed.”

“Who told you my senior superlative?” Shane asks breezily. “Oh hey, look! You can see the mesas from here.”

Ryan follows where Shane is pointing. The mesas looks dark purple on the far end of the desert, swathed in clouds. Blurry sheets of far-away rain hang down off them, far enough away they don’t even make a dent on the bright blue of the sky above them. You couldn’t ever get caught  by surprise, Ryan thinks, if you could always see the rain like this. If you could always see it coming.

Shane looks genuinely thrilled about the mesas, and the cacti, and the way the road cuts through the desert, pointing north, so Ryan swallows the strange melancholy that tightens his throat and injects his voice with as much enthusiasm as he can when he says, “Cool!”

This has been happening, lately; a sudden, overwhelming sense that he has lost something, or is losing it. But he doesn’t understand why. Things are good: the network launch was successful, both _Ruining History_ and _BFU: Sports Conspiracies_ are getting second seasons, and Ryan has been on four very pleasant dates with a girl from Minnesota who teaches yoga and believes in ghosts.

Devon meets his eyes in the rearview mirror, a small furrow between her eyebrows, but if anyone else notices the flimsy nature of his excitement, they don’t say anything. TJ reaches forward and bumps up the music, something electronic and terrible, and Ryan leans back against the seat, closing his eyes.

 _Get it together_ , he tells himself sternly. _You’ll ruin the episode._

“. . . been subscribed to Cactus Facts,” Shane is saying, drumming his thumbs on the steering wheel. “To unsubscribe — ”

“— shove your driver out of the moving vehicle,” Ryan interjects, aiming for playful and just managing dry. “I’m gonna change your name in the credits to _Cactus Madej._ ”

“I like it,” Shane decides. “I too am a long, spiky boy.”

Despite himself, Ryan barks out a laugh, clapping his hand to his chest. “A long, spiky boy,” he repeats, wheezing a little. “I’m putting that on your gravestone. _Here lies Shane Madej: he was a long, spiky boy._ A real prickly sonofabitch.”

“Hey. That’s _Cactus_ Madej to you, my good buddy.”

“Have we been saying ‘Madej’ more than usual on this trip, or is it just me?” Ryan asks. “It’s starting to sound weird.”

Shane opens his mouth, but shuts it again when Mark reaches down to the floor and pulls the handheld out again. “If you’re gonna do bits, let me get set up again,” he says, voice wry as it always is.

Ryan meets Shane’s eyes in the mirror. _They’re not bits_ , he thinks, helplessly. _They’re just — he’s my friend._

But the camera is out and rolling, so Ryan doesn’t say anything.

—

The truth, of course, is that Ryan does know where the fear comes from, because Ryan is many things but _vaguely anxious_ is not one of them. Ryan knows every single one of his myriad fears, knows all their nooks and crannies, knows their origins and their underlying psychological implications, but in this case he’s Not Thinking About It. He’s been Not Thinking About It for several weeks, and it’s going great, and he’s not going to start now.

They get to the Canyon around four, even with all the stops. Shane had been right about the route: they’d driven through the Coconino National Forest, road winding through pine trees like something out of a film. Shane had made them put on one of his Americana playlists, the ones he pretends don’t make him nostalgic for Illinois, and they’d been quiet as he drove, all their eyes out the window.

It had been beautiful, and atmospheric, and Ryan hated the mood it put him in, the mood it gave the whole trip: stretched and quiet and acoustic, exactly the opposite of the rowdy road trip they probably needed.

They stop to point at elk (“ELK,” Devon had said suddenly, and everyone echoed her like excited seagulls: “Elk! Elk! Elk! Elk!”) and stop again in Flagstaff, in a field covered in yellow flowers that stretch on and on to the foothills of the mountains, covered in snow even this early in September.

The wind is soft and the mountains and dark blue and Shane is smiling and bright, all seven million feet of him, and as Ryan shoots an Instagram story for the BFU account, he can’t quite make himself publish the video of it: Shane, standing with his hands in his pockets, smiling at mountains. It looks too much like _Shane,_ like the version of him that only exists off-camera, the one that met Ryan on his first day at Buzzfeed and had decided, for whatever reason, that they were going to be friends. Ryan saves the photo and posts a more bland one instead, of the five of them in a cluster smiling. He captions it _can you guess where the ghoul boy crew is? this ep is gonna be sick!!!_

(“Excuse me, I’m not a ghoul boy,” Devon says when she sees it; “Sorry, Devon,” says Shane. “Ryan, please note that this post caption should say ghoul _folk_.”)

Once they get into the Canyon, they check into their hotel rooms and take a minute to regroup; they’re on the Southern Rim, but not in the same village — Shane and Ryan are stuck in the one with worse cell service and no WiFi, because for some stupid reason he’d been convinced when he made the reservation that an environment with fewer distractions would encourage ghostly interaction. That seems very stupid now, sitting quietly on the beds as Mark and TJ set up the cameras for the intro, staring down at his hands with the whole of Arizona heavy on his chest and thinking of the three days they have in front of them: just Ryan, Shane, and the thing that Ryan is Not Thinking About and now doesn’t have the internet to distract him from.

“You okay?” Shane asks quietly as Mark settles and TJ gets the light adjusted.

He’s been — very solicitous with Ryan, the past few weeks, since the thing ... happened. He’s been kind and careful and slow-moving, like Ryan’s a horse that’s going to startle and run. Of course, he would be. Ryan knows that he’s — well, that he had a lot of work to do, and that it’s been a long process of doing it, but Shane is his friend, right, and it sucks that he thinks ... it just sucks, is all.

It sucks to think that maybe all of this is more fragile than Ryan had thought. It sucks to think that maybe Shane doesn’t — that Shane hadn’t ever —

 _NOT THINKING ABOUT IT_ , he reminds himself.

He smiles at Shane. “Me? Yeah, totally fine,” he lies. “It’s just spooky out here. You’re not feeling the spook?”

“I’m never feeling the spook,” Shane reminds him dryly. “I’m un-spook-able.”

“Oh yeah?” Ryan wheedles. “There’s nothing at _all_ that could make you cut and run?”

He regrets it the exact moment it’s out of his mouth. _Shit_ , Ryan thinks, and then, his brain like Mark’s voice: _terrible bits, boys._ Shane’s eyes get wide for a second, just long enough that Ryan if the cameras were rolling, they’d have to edit this whole exchange out of the episode.

“Uh,” Shane says, then coughs a little, masking his expression by hiding his face in the crook of his elbow. “Yeah — maybe — a serial killer, or — someone holding a syringe full of heroin.”

Ryan manages not to cringe at Shane’s extremely unsmooth save, but barely. He says, “No one is chasing you with a syringe full of anything, Shane. Nobody wants to get you hooked on heroin. That’s not a _thing_.”

TJ clears his throat. “Okay, we’ve got the light; let’s shoot this thing before the sun starts to set and we have to adjust again.”

Ryan is careful not to look at Shane. He looks at the camera instead and grins and says, “Guess where we are,” in the voice he only knows how to access when the camera is rolling. “It’s pretty ... grand.”

“Booooooo,” drawls Shane, holding up two thumbs down.

Ryan ignores him.

—

Today we are going to be talking about the mysterious disappearance of Bessie and Glen Hyde. Bessie and Glen got married in 1928, and took a honeymoon rafting trip to the Grand Canyon. Glen was an experienced river-runner; Bessie was more of a novice. By all intents and purposes, they were the perfect couple: happy, deeply in love, and looking forward to a long life together.

They checked in first at the entrance to the park, and then, later, at Phantom Ranch. From there, they took their boat to the Colorado River and set out.

They never returned.

**_spooky._ **

_you DO feel the spook!_

**_well, sure, but i don’t think it’s_ ghosts _. i just think_**  
**_it’s very sad that this couple clearly drowned in the  
__river._**

 _well, maybe. but there’s — just wait. maybe they  
_ _didn’t, is all i’m saying._

**_if you say they were abducted by aliens i swear  
__to god i will get in the car and go home._ **

_i’m not going to say aliens. yet._

**_yet?_ **

_or maybe not at all! just wait. you’ll see._  

A massive search party was organized by Glen’s father, Rollin, but all they ever found was their abandoned raft, circling an eddy. Neither Bessie nor Glen nor any sign of where the two might be were in it. All that was found of them were the remains of their supplies and a diary — Bessie’s. Some people suggest that the diary hinted that perhaps not all was as it may have seemed: Glen had become increasingly aggressive, and Bessie was reaching the end of her rope. She was frightened. She was angry. This was not the life she had planned for herself.

Eventually, the search party gave up. No bodies were ever found.

**_oh, so he killed her, then._ **

_you think that’s what happened?_

**_i mean ... it’s usually the husband._ **  
**_almost all the time. nobody should ever get married  
_ _unless they also want to get murdered._**

 _that’s — wow, that’s very romantic. you should  
_ _write anniversary cards._

 **_violets are red_ **  
**_roses are blue_**  
**_please love me forever  
_ _or i’ll murder you_**

_[wheeze]_

There are many theories about what happened to Bessie and Glen. The first theory, popular among many but never verified by police, actually suggests that Bessie survived the trip down the river, and in fact murdered Glen and formed a new identity as the Colorado River’s first rafting female guide.  

**_woah, hohoho — what? YES._ **

_hahahaha. i knew you’d like this theory. you think_ _that’s what happened?_  

 **_absolutely. 100%. bessie realizes her husband isn’t_ **  
**_what she thought he was, she kills him in the night, stages_**  
**_it to look like an accident, and then comes back to the_**  
**_SCENE OF THE CRIME to ask for a job. that’s —  
_ ** _**that’s real moxie. you go girl.** _

_yeah? i haven’t even given you the evidence yet._  

**_as i have always said, evidence shmevidence._ **

_you — yeah, as you have always — notoriously  
__willing to believe —_  

 **_i WANT to believe, ryan. isn’t that what  
__counts in the end?_ **

_no._  

**_okay._ **

Several years after the disappearance, a woman named Georgie Clark became the first-ever female river-runner. She knew the Colorado like the back of her hand — a thing that should have been impossible, given that if Bessie and Glen had made it down the river, Bessie would have become the first woman ever to accomplish it.

Evidence for this theory include Bessie’s diary, which potentially shows her mounting dissatisfaction with her marriage, and a striking resemblance between photos of Bessie and the rafting guide when shown side-by-side.  Friends she had known for decades had never been invited into her home. Additionally, upon Clark’s death, birth certificates in her home showed her given name to really be Bessie DeVoss.

 _so that’s ... so what do you think? pretty compelling._  

 **_very compelling. extremely. also, i love it._ **  
**_just generally. you should have left this theory  
_ _for last because i’ve got my answer._ **

 

_should we just call it? pack it up and go home?_

**_pack it up, boys! that’s a wrap on the grand canyon!  
__we solved it!_ **

_great, then you owe me $500._  

 **_bring it back out, boys! we didn’t solve it!_ **  

The second theory posits that both Glen and Bessie died in a rafting accident. The Colorado River was notoriously difficult to raft, and although the couple were skilled rafters, they weren’t professionals. Proponents of this theory wonder why, if Bessie really did kill Glen and make off into the Canyon to start fresh, did she leave her incriminating diary and all their supplies behind? These would have been invaluable to her during the time between when she killed Glen and when she emerged from the Canyon.

The other potential hole in the first theory is a logistical one: if Bessie killed Glen and finished rafting the river, what boat did she do it in? Where did she go? How was it possible that all the search parties never found her or any evidence of her?

 **_hmm._ **

_uh-oh. hmm, what’s hmm?_  

 **_they’re good points._ **

_so you think they both died?_  

**_well — logically, yes. but that’s a significantly_ **  
**_bigger bummer of a story, so i’m going to stick with  
_ _my girl, the murderous outlaw rafting professional._ **

_you do love a murder._  

**_hahah—i do love a murder. that’s true._ **

In this theory, Bessie and Glen were killed while rafting — perhaps by being thrown from the boat, or perhaps someone fell in and the other jumped in to try and save the other. The mile 232 rapid, where they went missing, was still uncharted in 1928, and is one of the most difficult areas of the river.  Their bodies were not found with the boat because they were carried downriver and perhaps even out to the ocean. Although the Colorado River no longer reaches the Pacific, in those days it still did, and it is not impossible that Bessie and Glen were carried all the way to the sea.

This theory would explain the presence of supplies in the boat, as well as Bessie’s diary.

**_well — occam’s razor, you know._ **

_the simplest explanation is probably true?_  

 **_yeah, but i’m still pulling for murder. it’s  
__got such great flair to it._ **

_well ... there’s one more theory._  

**_if you say aliens, ryan._ **

_i’m not gonna say aliens._  

The final theory is less of a theory and more of a follow-up. The story goes that Bessie and Glen _did_ both die in 1928. Whether Bessie killed Glen, or Glen killed Bessie, or nobody killed anybody and they were simply victims of mother nature, people have reported hearing voices on the Bright Angel Trail, down by the river. They say these are the ghosts of Bessie and Glen, trapped forever by the rapids.

Grand Canyon staff and visitors to the park say they’ve heard Bessie asking plaintively, “Will I ever wear pretty shoes again?” They’ve also felt pulled or pushed to join the couple in the river. One person even said they experienced a kind of sensory dissociation, as if they were drowning.

Today, we’re going to hike the trail and see for ourselves whether we can convince Bessie and Glen to talk to us, and tell us what really happened to them that fateful day.

**_oh for the love of —_ **

_[wheeze] it’s not aliens! i didn’t say aliens._

—

They wrap up quickly, the sun setting faster than anyone expects. They plan to meet up in the morning and set out on an early hike, before the trail gets too crowded with other tourists. They’re not going far down the trail; Ryan had pitched hard for Buzzfeed to let them hike all the way down to the river, but they couldn’t get it past the legal department because it’s literally monsoon season and not a one of them except Shane has ever camped anywhere other than their backyard, so they’re only going as far as Phantom Ranch, camping out for the night, and coming back.

Shane and Ryan go to bed pretty quickly, since there’s no WiFi and nothing much else to do other than talk to each other, and it’s been — increasingly hard to do that, when the crew isn’t around or there aren’t cameras trained on them. They can still fall into it, when filming; there’s comfort in how easy it is, in how Ryan feels himself sliding back into the person he is when he’s bickering cheerfully with Shane, when they’re the ghoul boys. Ryan could do it in his sleep.

It’s the other stuff that’s been ... strained. Ryan stares at the ceiling, lets Shane choose a TV channel, and plays counting games in his head. After a while, when he’s starting to drift, lulled by the TV and the soft canyon sounds outside, he hears the TV volume slide downward. Into the dark, Shane says, “Hey, are we — okay?”

Ryan’s throat aches, suddenly. Maybe he’s getting sick. Maybe this whole thing is just the coming of a particularly bad cold.

He turns his head to look out the window, and despite all his best intentions, thinks about it: three weeks ago, Shane and Ryan on the _Unsolved_ set way, way, way after they ought to have gone home, dizzy from working too long without a break. Ryan said something stupid and Shane had laughed at it, in that way he only ever does when Ryan is around. It’s not that Shane _doesn’t laugh;_ he laughs all the time. He laughs at newspaper comics, and vid compilations of people falling down, and most of the random and strange goings on at the Buzzfeed LA office.

It’s just that he rarely laughs the way he laughs when he’s with Ryan: eyes squeezed into squints, nose wrinkled, hands floating up uselessly to grab at his face or his shirt or his chest.

Ryan had watched him laugh and had felt his chest get warm and big and bright, and without thinking he’d reached out and touched Shane’s face, pressed his fingertips right to the edge of his mouth, and said, “Shane.”

He cringes now, thinking about it, remembering how he’d said it, the way his tone had carried everything in just one word, the way he’d — he’d said _Shane_ but he’d meant —

 _You turned away_ , he thinks but doesn’t say. _You pulled back and turned away and said, “We should head out,” and never brought it up again._

He thinks: _what else could we be other than okay?_ _What other options are there?_

He thinks: _you were in a box and you got out of the box and I don’t know how to put you in the box again, even though you clearly want to be back in it._

“Of course we’re okay,” Ryan answers, still looking out the window. He stays like that until he hears Shane sigh and turn over, pulling the covers up.

—

In the morning, things still feel tender and awful, and Ryan knows it, and he knows it’s his fault, and he can’t seem to stop it. It’s just that he’s never been able to hide what he’s feeling, particularly, and Shane _only_ hides what he’s feeling, so Ryan is stuck just — swirling around and around like Bessie and Glen Hyde’s boat, full of clues but without anyone to solve them.

He can feel himself being higher energy than usual to make up for it, laughing louder and committing more to bits that he’d have otherwise let fade; the looks that Shane is giving him make it plain that he can see the mania behind Ryan’s speech, but he can’t help it. Every time they’re quiet it’s like he can feel everyone looking at him, reading his face, knowing what he’s feeling, and he just — for _once_ , just for this one thing, he doesn’t want them to.

He doesn’t want _Shane_ to.

Shane, who is always so languid and sleepy-looking and soft, totally lacking the manic tension that has Ryan constantly shoving his hands in his pockets so that nobody can tell they’ve turned into panicked fists. He just seems so _calm_ all the time, even when he also looks exhausted, even when Ryan knows he has deadlines; stress never gets out of his head and into his body. Ryan kind of hates him for it, a little, because it is so obvious and embarrassing when Ryan is stressed or upset, and with Shane, you can never tell, unless you really know to look.

They break for lunch, just sandwiches they’d picked up from the general store and some cinnamon breakfast cookies for dessert, and Ryan takes the opportunity to claim a need for the bathroom, just to take a break. He hates feeling like he’s performing his own life, but he can’t seem to stop, not when TJ and Mark and Devon are all here, and any whiff of tension between him and Shane would become a whole ... _thing_ , something they had to talk about as a crew because Shane’s and Ryan’s relationship affects all of them, affects their _jobs_ , and here Ryan is just — ruining it.

He knows. He _knows_. He’s going to get it together, because what even happened? Nothing. A face-touch and Shane’s own name, that’s nothing, it’s not like Ryan _kissed_ him, it’s not like Ryan —

It’s not like he ever said _explicitly_ —

“Ryan? Where are you going? The bathroom is that way. There’s ... really a very high volume of signs, buddy.”

Ryan turns at the sound of Shane’s voice, startled. “Oh, yeah,” he says, looking past where Shane’s thumb is hooked over his shoulder at the sign that does, very clearly, indicate that the bathroom is in the opposite direction. “Well — I changed my mind.”

Shane blinks. “About peeing?” he asks. “Can you do that? Physiologically?”

Despite himself, Ryan huffs out a laugh. “No, I ... I mean, I didn’t really have to go, I was just feeling — I wanted to have a second to, you know, look at the view off-camera.”

Shane nods slowly, tucking his hands into his pockets. He rocks back on his heels and looks out to the rim. “Mind if I join you?” he asks, sounding slow and careful, like he’s being gentle with Ryan’s feelings, like Ryan is a bomb that’s going to explode.

And suddenly that’s exactly how Ryan feels, the slow wick of misery lighting up into anger, which he knows is unfair, which he _knows_ is misplaced, anger at himself becoming anger at Shane, but he doesn’t care.

He scrubs at his forehead as he snaps, “Look, man, I just need space.”

Shane’s eyebrows go up, and his face registers genuine surprise. “From people generally or from me specifically?” he asks.

Ryan levels him with a look. “The fuck you think, dude? I’m getting tired of Noted Chatterbox Mark Celestino?” Shane looks away, and Ryan pinches at the bridge of his nose and tries to reign in the way his voice sounds. “Sorry. I don’t ... it isn’t — ”

The problem is that he doesn’t know how to talk about it, because it wasn’t anything. What is he going to say? “You didn’t let me touch your face and now I’m worried I misread our entire friendship”? That’s crazy. Ryan knows that’s crazy.

It’s just — a lot of things at once, the network launch, the Face Touching Incident, and now this trip, with the soft music and the camaraderie and Shane standing in a field of fucking flowers, looking like the cover of a Mumford & Sons album. Ryan just feels like he is at the end of a very frayed rope.

 _Very_ frayed. Holding by a _thread._

“You’re mad at me,” Shane realizes. “You’re _mad._ At _me_.”

Ryan winces. “No,” he says quickly, even though he is, right at this moment, pretty mad. “I mean — it’s coming out as mad but I’m _not_ mad. Or I mean. I know I don’t get to be mad.” He sighs, covering his eyes briefly and then dropping them, making himself look at Shane. “Look, can we not talk about this?”

“Uh, no, we’re definitely talking about this,” Shane answers. “You’re so mad at me you — you can barely even _look_ at me, man, what the fuck? What do you even have to be mad about?”

“What do _I_ have to be _mad about_?” Ryan parrots, gaping. “Are you _kidding_ me?”

Shane is staring at him like Ryan’s suddenly announced that demons are fake and he’s changing the artistic direction of _Unsolved_ to be about disproving spiritualists, Harry Houdini-style.  

“You touched _me_ ,” Shane snaps, and his voice is so taut that Ryan is worried for a second that his vocal chords are going to snap. He closes his eyes, because Shane is right, because clearly Shane knows that it was nothing but it wasn’t _nothing_ nothing, and because he guesses now they’re just going to have to talk about it, here, in the middle of the trail, while they film a fucking episode of the show that pays both their rents. “ _You_ did. I didn’t — I didn’t _start it_ , Ryan, I’d have never — ”

“I never said you started it!” Ryan hisses back, not willing to hear Shane finish his sentence. “I get it! I know what happened! I was there! Can we please not _talk about this now_? TJ and Devon and Mark are _right_ there.”

Shane flinches. He looks back over his shoulder; they can’t see the crew, but they can hear them, laughter soft and a little far away. “Right,” Shane says. “I get it. No homo.”

Ryan takes a step back like he’s falling. Something regretful spills across Shane’s face, and he opens his mouth like he wants to gather the words back up, but the ringing in Ryan’s ears would have drowned it out anyway. “Oh, fuck you, man,” he manages. “Just — _fuck_ you.”

He takes another step back. Shane’s expression shifts. He reaches out a hand and Ryan thinks he’s saying something, but there’s no sound coming out and for some reason Ryan’s vision is going blurry, dark around the edges.

Is he passing out?

Another step. He feels like he can’t stop, like there is something prodding him back. Shane is coming toward him, almost stumbling, just enough to grab Ryan’s hand. They’re steady, for a second, Ryan’s vision coming back, his head clearing, his feet planting just on the edge.

“ — hear me?” Shane is saying. “Ryan?”

“I can hear you,” Ryan answers. “Yeah, I can hear you. Jesus. What the hell was — ?”

And then Ryan feels it: two big hands, flat on his chest, sending him backwards off the edge with a single, definitive shove.

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I am beginning to think that we are quite deeply entrenched in what some people would call a real fucking pickle, Ryan,” he says, because jokes and repression are what Shane does best.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "THESE ARE WHAT WE CALL HARD FEELINGS!!!" - lorde (21) and shane madej (32)

Shane keeps hold of Ryan’s arm as they fall. He knows this is one of those “let go or be dragged” kind of situations, but at the same time he can’t make himself loosen his grip, and even if he could, it’s like ... look, ghosts aren’t real, but if they were real, Shane would be _pretty fucking sure_ one had just shoved him off a cliff.

They don’t fall far — in a stroke of sheer, dumb luck they manage to trip off the edge of a gentler slope, rather than a sheer cliff, and although Shane is pretty sure he’s going to wake up with a headache, at least they aren’t both splattered on a rockface somewhere.

Still: they hit the ground hard, and in the tumble afterwards Shane gets dislodged from Ryan, hand slipping away.

The second it does, the pain hits, all-encompassing, hot and cold at once. His ears are ringing like there’s a foghorn in his head, and when he tries to scream about it, he’s pretty sure he can’t make any sound. He claps his hands over his ears, and it’s a little better, not exactly manageable but at least enough that he doesn’t feel quite so much like he’s going to throw up.

Ryan lands several feet below him and doesn’t stir. Shane calls out to him, but it’s like — it’s like someone is holding down a mute button. He can’t hear anything, and he knows he’s not making sound, can feel the silence in his throat.

Shane tries not to panic.

Clearly, he hit his head. Or maybe it’s a spinal thing. Maybe he just has to lay here, very still, until Ryan wakes up and can get them help. The hospital bill for the airlift helicopter will probably put him in debt for life, but that’s fine. Shane would rather be back living with his parents in Schaumburg than dead at the bottom of a cliff.

He scoots a little closer to Ryan, not moving his hands from his ears. He just — he has to get close. He doesn’t know how he knows, only that he does: the closer he is to Ryan, the better. The less it will hurt. It sounds stupid in his own head but stupid doesn’t mean untrue.

 _If a solution is stupid but it works, it’s not stupid_ , he thinks, somewhat hysterically.

Ryan still hasn’t moved.

DON’T BE DEAD, Shane shouts soundlessly at him. RYAN. YOU CAN’T BE DEAD. I NEED YOU NOT TO BE DEAD. He edges closer, but has to pause to breathe carefully through a wave of nausea. What kind of spinal injury _feels_ like this? RYAN BUDDY PLEASE WAKE UP THE LAST WORDS I SAY TO YOU _CANNOT BE_ NO HOMO, THAT’S — RYAN. RYAN. RYAN.

He lays still, just breathing, getting together what strength he can. He’s getting there. At this rate it will only take him two years.

Ryan’s face twitches.

Shane’s gonna cry with relief, maybe.

Ryan’s mouth is moving, but Shane can’t hear anything he’s saying; RYAN I AM RIGHT HERE, he yells, but of course it makes no difference. Ryan can’t hear him, and his eyes are still closed. Clearly something has gone very wrong in Shane’s throat. He can see Ryan talking but there’s nothing other than the unbearable loud ringing, and Shane is going to throw up. He tries to inch forward but it — God, it _hurts_ , everything, literally every part of him.

Ryan’s head rolls to the side, and his eyes snap open. They land on Shane.

RYAN, Shane shouts.

Shane can’t hear his response, but he knows what Ryan’s mouth looks like when it’s saying his name. He has spent three weeks replaying it, over and over, Ryan saying _Shane_ like it was a holy word.

Shane judges the distance between them. It’s far, but he’s long. He can do it. He meets Ryan’s eyes and he takes his hands off his ears despite the pain and he lunges forward, hands out. Ryan reaches for him at the same time, and their hands connect, fingers twining.

The relief is instantaneous, all the pain flooding out of him, the ringing coming to an abrupt halt. Shane can hear again. Shane can — “Ryan, fuck, fuck, are you okay? Can you move? Can you hear me?”

“I can hear you,” Ryan says. He’s blinking dizzily. “Shit — oh my God Shane I can see again, I couldn’t —  I mean I _could_ but it fucking — ”

“My _ears_ ,” Shane says, “my fucking _throat_ didn’t work, what the _fuck —_?”

Ryan is shaking his head. “I think ... like ten seconds ago I honestly thought I was dying, dude, the pain was — ”

“Exquisite,” Shane supplies. “I think I finally understand what people mean they say _exquisite_ _pain._ ”

“Yeah.” Ryan blows out a shaky breath. He’s still holding Shane’s hand, his grip tight. “But now it’s just — gone. I feel totally fine.”

Shane does an internal stock-take. He ... also feels fine. The pain that had been swallowing him is completely gone, and more importantly, he can hear and speak again. He looks down at where their hands are clasped.

It’s impossible, of course. Completely irrational to think that touching Ryan was what cured him. Clearly they were both just experiencing some kind of hysterical psychological break, maybe because of the fall, maybe because of the fight and _then_ the fall, Shane doesn’t know. He’s not a psychologist.

“Ryan,” he says slowly, “I am going to do an experiment and it might be really, really unpleasant.”

Ryan frowns at him. He looks down at their hands and then back up at Shane, frown deepening. Shane doesn’t — he doesn’t know what that frown means, hasn’t known what any of Ryan’s looks have meant for the last month. Ryan, whose emotions he can usually read better than he can read his own, has been all over the map. Saying _Shane_ but then not following Shane out when he invited him, avoiding him at the office, skittish and jumpy and embarrassed, like he regretted it, whatever _it_ was.

“Please don’t,” Ryan says, voice soft.

Shane’s never been great at saying no when Ryan says please, but they _can’t_ not know.

“We can’t hold hands forever,” Shane reasons gently. He tries for a joke: “What would the viewers think?”

“I don’t give a _shit_ what the _viewers think,_ ” Ryan snarls, taking Shane aback with the force of it. He visibly collects himself, closing his eyes and taking a few deep breaths. “Shane. Did ... when you fell, did it feel like — ?”

Shane doesn’t want to say it, even though he knows what Ryan is asking. Now that he knows Ryan is alive, and the pain is gone, he can feel the irritation from earlier creeping back in, the sting of Ryan being — whatever. Ashamed.

 “It wasn’t ghosts,” Shane tells him sternly. “But yes, I did feel like I was ... knocked over the edge.”

Ryan gives him a look. “That you can say those two sentences side by side completely seriously is remarkable,” he says. “Oh, I’m Shane, I was pushed by something invisible but it couldn’t be ghosts!”

“It _couldn’t_ be ghosts, because ghosts do not _exist_. Maybe it was, I don’t know, a wind corridor, and we were just hit with a particularly strong gust.”

“You’re going with the _wind_ did it?” Ryan’s voice is aghast, his jaw a little open. “Are you fucking _kidding_ me, dude?”

“I mean, yeah, Ryan. I’m going with the wind did it, because even if it’s unlikely, it’s more likely than that it was the fucking—spirit of Bessie Hyde or whatever.”

“Jesus Christ, we’re not on camera, no one else can hear you, just admit—”

“I’m not doing a fucking _bit,_ Ryan, I really, genuinely don’t believe that it was—”

“You don’t think it was weird? You think it’s totally normal than we were pushed off a cliff and now can’t let go of each other without being blinded by excruciating pain?”

“Of course I think it’s weird! It’s very fucking weird! That doesn’t mean it was ghosts!”

Ryan glares at him. “Fine,” he says. “Fine. Let’s _experiment_ , if you’re going to be such a fucking tool about it—”

He yanks his hand out of Shane’s.

The second he does, the very moment they aren’t touching, the pain comes back, stronger than before, more insistent. If pain could have intent, this one wants Shane in a tiny ball, screaming. His ears shut down and he can feel his voice dissolve in his throat. Ryan’s eyes are squeezed shut again, his shoulders hunched in against the onslaught, and Shane reaches back out, grabs his hand again and drags it forward to his chest, trapping it there in relief as the pain washes away, as his hearing comes back.

 _If a solution is stupid but it works, it’s not stupid_ , he thinks again.

Ryan opens his eyes. The heat is gone from them, and he is left just looking shaken.

“Shit,” he says. “Fuck. Jesus Christ. That — I hated that, that was so bad, that was the worst idea I’ve ever had—”

“Let’s ... not do that again,” Shane suggests, voice  a little too loud. He clears his throat. They’re still lying down, and it’s starting to get uncomfortable, so Shane starts shifting to sit up. Ryan’s eyes fly up to his, panicked, and Shane is still _so mad_ at him, but he gives his hand a squeeze. “I’m not letting go,” he promises. “But we have to sit up. Also stand up, eventually. But let’s take it one level at a time.”

Ryan nods, blowing out a breath. He waits until Shane has gotten into a seated position, arm stretched oddly and upside down, and then, very carefully, without taking his hand from Shane’s chest, turns it clockwise, rightside up.

Shane hates his heart for turning with it, flipping over loudly enough that he’s convinced Ryan can hear it.

 _Shane,_ Ryan had said, and then nothing else.

When they’re seated cross-legged across from one another, Ryan meets his eyes. Shane takes his hand back and brings it down to his lap, holding Ryan’s one in his two.

He doesn’t feel angry anymore. He runs his thumbs over Ryan’s knuckles.

“I’m sorry,” he says quietly. “I shouldn’t have said — what I said, up there. That was fucked up.”

Ryan swallows. “I didn’t — when I said they were nearby. That’s not what I was trying to say. I don’t care if they — it’s just private. That’s all. That’s what I meant.”

“I know,” Shane says, and does. Probably did at the time. Ryan might be panicking about them having a ... _moment_ , or whatever, but it’s not fair to throw it in his face. Shane has been working _so hard_ not to hold the moment against him.

Not to hold him _to it_.

Ryan nods. “Fuck you, though,” he says, but lightly, almost joking. Shane grins. That’s okay, then. That part at least, if nothing else.

“... ane? Ryan? Guys?”

They look at each other, and then up. “HEY,” Ryan shouts. “GUYS! WE’RE DOWN HERE.”

Devon’s head appears over the edge of the rim. “Holy shit,” she says, “what the fuck happened? Are you okay? Can you get back up?”

“We fell, yes, I don’t know,” Shane answers. “The rocks look—pretty shifty. I’m not thrilled about the idea of falling further and plunging to my death. Is there a rope or something?”

TJ pops up beside Devon, frowning. “Well, this isn’t great,” he diagnoses.

“Thanks for the insight, Teej,” Shane says dryly.

“I think the cord for the microphones might reach,” Devon muses. “Teej, go get Mark and have him bring the stuff. There’s got to be something. If not, we can call the park service.”

Ryan slaps his forehead with his free hand. “Please let’s not involve the authorities,” he begs. “HR is gonna be so mad at me. _Legal_ is gonna be so mad at me.”

Devon holds up the handheld camera. “So, how’re the ghoul boys doing?”

“We were pushed by a ghost,” Ryan says instantly.

“We were taken by surprise by a gust of wind,” Shane corrects.

“Does now feel like the time to be having this argument?” Ryan asks. “Or to be filming?” He lowers his voice. “How’re we gonna get back up without letting go?”

Shane ... hadn’t thought about that. “We hold hands,” he decides. “I’ll hold the rope with my free hand and you push up off the ground.”

It occurs to Shane that Devon is still filming, and they are very obviously holding hands. He glances nervously at Ryan, but Ryan doesn’t seem to have noticed.

When Mark appears with the gear, he sighs down at them, clearly disappointed in but not surprised by their behavior. Shane wilts a little, even though it’s not like they _intended_ to fall.

The cord for the microphone does reach, though barely. They tie one end to a tree at the edge of the rim and throw the rest down; Shane is tall enough to grab it, but he needs both hands, so Ryan has to hold on to his ankle while he does, soliciting an odd look from Devon. He gets a solid grip and then holds out his hand.

Ryan takes it, keeping one hand on Shane’s ankle until they’re connected at the other.

“Ready?” Shane asks. Ryan takes a deep breath and then nods, and up they go.

_—_

They don’t end up filming much more; Shane doesn’t have to feign feeling sick, and Ryan makes a big to-do over it maybe being a concussion. They hike back up the trail, Shane trailing Ryan with his hands on his shoulders, trying to make it look like he’s pushing him or, failing that, using him as a human walking stick.

“Hey ghosts,” Shane calls, more for the benefit of the camera than anything else, “if you _did_ push us earlier, that was a real dick move. You can quote me on that. ‘Ghosts are dicks.’ Shane Madej, 2019.”

“I swear to _God,_ Shane,” Ryan grumbles wearily. “They _just_ pushed us off a cliff, can you lay off antagonizing them until we are at least away from the fucking rim?”

Shane — feels a little panicky, actually, suddenly. He looks at the edge of the trail, then at the back of Ryan’s head.

It _had felt_ like hands, is the thing.

Or maybe Shane really does have a concussion, and his head is just all jumbled.

Still. He goes quiet. Not because he believes but because ... well, better safe than sorry, for now.

By unspoken agreement, Ryan and Shane get into the backseat together, surprising the crew, who look at one another like they have no idea who is supposed to drive. Eventually Mark gets into the driver’s seat; Ryan is pressed against Shane from his shoulder to his ankles.

It feels better the more they’re touching, Shane is coming to realize with a sense of dread. Holding Ryan’s hand is fine, but having his whole side makes Shane feel not just no pain but also a sense of warmth, and well-being, like he’s being given a present for good behavior.

 _Hell of a concussion,_ he thinks to himself, making a note to look up whether delusions are common symptoms of head bumps.

They get dropped at their cabin and Shane takes Ryan’s hand before getting out of the car.

“Uh,” says TJ.

“See you guys tomorrow,” says Shane, closing the door on him.

The car isn’t even out of their parking lot when the text comes in, just _????????_ , which Shane ignores.

Ryan looks over at his phone and sighs. “Yeah,” he says. “I dunno what we’re going to do about that. Shared trauma, maybe?”

“Trauma can make people do and think all kinds of things,” Shane agrees carefully, looking down at their linked hands.

Ryan rolls his eyes. “Dude, stop,” he snaps. “Just stop. If you can’t explain it, stop trying, because if you don’t, I’m going to kill you and I don’t want to have to lug your dead body around.”

Despite everything, Shane laughs. “You’re too short to lug me around,” he says. “You’d be stuck where I fell.”

He opens the door to the cabin, and it isn’t until it closes behind them that it really hits Shane that they are _holding hands,_ that they will have to hold hands through all the things you do in hotels: showering, changing, eating, sleeping, brushing their teeth.

Ryan has gone still beside him, and Shane thinks it is occurring to him, too, given the way he is staring at the beds.

Shane wants to crack a joke, but he thinks maybe they’re still fighting. He feels off-kilter, unsure for the first time in the history of their friendship about where he stands with Ryan. He wasn’t exactly hard to read, and Shane liked to read him more than almost anything else. It had always been clear, before: Shane was Ryan’s best friend, and sometimes he annoyed him, but mostly he was a settling influence, and Ryan took comfort in how unflappable he was and pride in being able, occasionally, to flap him.

And, of course, Shane was irritatingly, pathetically in love with him, but that was almost beside the point — or it had been, before Ryan had touched Shane’s mouth like he was touching something precious and said Shane’s name the way he’d say _I love you._

Shane had been so _good_ , is the thing _._ Ryan had been standing there, touching him, looking at him in the way that Shane has never let himself look at Ryan. He’d have been well within the mood of the moment to lean down and kiss him, to say _Ryan_ the way Ryan had said _Shane_.

But they were at work, and _Unsolved_ was so important to both of them, and anyway Shane had spent a long time drawing up the very specific list of rules that he’d put in place as soon as he’d realized that The Ryan Thing was going to be a capital-p Problem. They weren’t listed in any particular order but _don’t do anything without double-checking_ was definitely up towards the top, because Ryan was impulsive and then regretful but Shane was slow to start but committed once he did, and neither of them were really built to weather critical mistakes.

So he’d said, “We should head out,” offering Ryan either an out or a chance to show he meant it, that it wasn’t impulse, that it wasn’t the long day and the punchy atmosphere, and it turns out he was right to, because look at them now: standing in silence, not knowing what to say, and Ryan mad at him for — what, _tricking_ him into face touching?

“You okay, dude?” Ryan asks, looking over at him.

Shane realizes that he’s getting himself worked up again; he shakes his head and takes a deep breath. “I am beginning to think that we are quite deeply entrenched in what some people would call a real fucking pickle, Ryan,” he says, because jokes and repression are what Shane does best.

Ryan doesn’t laugh. He looks down at where their hands are joined. “Yeah,” he says. “It’s bad enough here, but what about going home tomorrow? What about when we get back to LA?”

Shane’s stomach drops. “TSA isn’t going to let us go through the metal detector together.”

“I think we are going to have to experiment again.” Ryan winces, looking pretty miserable about it. “There’s got to be a way to — build up a tolerance, or something. I mean. It’s not like — we can’t just move in together and never be apart again.”

“Yeah,” he says out loud, instead of something embarrassing, like _why not?_ “So do you want to do that now, or ...”

Ryan shakes his head. “I honestly — can’t face it right now,” he admits. “Can we just ... chill for a second? Watch some TV?”

What Shane would like to do is get in a scalding hot shower and not get out until he’s either drowned to death or this problem has gone away, but what is life if not a series of disappointments? So he tugs Ryan toward one of the beds and they maneuver awkwardly down, side by side. Ryan grabs the remote off the bedside table and manages to find a _Friends_ rerun, because Ryan can always be counted on to find the absolute worst sitcom imaginable no matter what time it is.

At first they just lay with their hands linked, Shane staring blindly at the TV and holding himself very, very still.

 _It felt better in the car_ , he thinks traitorously, remembering the way his skin had lit up the more they touched. But Shane isn’t going to bring it up; this is fine. It doesn’t hurt, so it’s fine. He’s gone this long without snuggling with Ryan in a hotel room, and if the Face Touching Incident is anything to go by, he’ll go a lot longer, so.

Ghosts don’t exist but if they did exist, they wanted Ryan and Shane to be connected from ankle to ear, so it was a good thing that Shane was a sensible person who wasn’t going to use Ryan’s belief in the supernatural to —

“It was better when we were driving, right?” Ryan asks, because Ryan has never met a limit he didn’t want to discard.

Shane sighs.

“Yeah, I guess,” he admits, already knowing that Ryan is going to shift and come closer and line them up so that he’s a steady line of heat. To Shane’s unsurprise but terrible dismay, they were right: it doesn’t just not hurt, it feels _good_ , the way putting aloe on a burn feels good.

 _Cool_ , Shane thinks. _Great. Really good stuff._

“ . . . Huh,” Ryan muses. “That’s so weird. Do you feel that?”

Shane manages to make ... some kind of facial expression; he’s honestly not sure what. “Yeah. It’s, uh.” He reconsiders saying _it’s good_ and instead jokes, “Well, it’s an improvement over being deaf and mute, I’ll go ahead and put that on record.”

Ryan lolls his head to the side, sighing quietly. For a second, he doesn’t say anything, just studies Shane’s face while Shane looks straight at the TV as if he doesn’t notice. _Don’t be brave_ , Shane thinks at him, because that’s Ryan’s We Have To Talk About This face. Shane still feels kind of tender from their argument in the Canyon, and Ryan is pressed up along his side like he might be if their relationship were different, but of course it isn’t different, and Ryan is there because he has to be.

After a long minute, in which Shane refuses to acknowledge Ryan’s obvious desire to have a conversation, Ryan rolls his head back to watch TV again. He says mildly, “Okay, so the more we’re touching, the better it feels. Interesting. I wonder — ”

He flushes, jaw snapping shut and face going dark.

Shane knows he shouldn’t, but he’s a midwesterner at heart and there is nothing more midwestern than getting past a fight by simply refusing to acknowledge it, so he cracks a grin and jokes, “What do you wonder, Ryan?”

“Nothing.”

“O-ho, but I don’t _think_ it’s nothing, my friend.”

“Shut up, Shane.”

Ryan sounds annoyed, but his lips are twitching, a little. Shane, flooded with relief, reaches over and pokes him in the side, hard enough not to tickle because Ryan hates fewer things in this world more than he hates being tickled. It’s like ... 1) tickling, 2) systemic inequality, 3) the hotdaga. Shane knows it’s a line of teasing that could circle them right back down the drain to their argument, but it’s also — there’s something so irresistible about winding Ryan up. So he says, “Well, _I_ wonder whether that means — ”

“Shut _up_ , Shane,” Ryan interrupts, before he can even get to the punchline, and then keeps talking so Shane can’t ignore him: “Okay. So we know that much. And we know that not touching at all is — uh — ”

“Unfettered agony?” Shane supplies. “Pure, excruciating anguish? Relentless torture?”

“All of the above, yes.” He hesitates, holding up their hands. “Not yet, but ... we do have to figure out how to get through it enough to make it through TSA. Once we get through the metal detectors we’ll be okay, I think. We’ve got seats next to each other on the plane.”

Ryan is right, which is irritating. “What if I have to pee while in the air?” he asks, just to be an asshole.

But Ryan, in full Sherlock Holmes Mode, doesn’t take the bait. “Then I guess people are just gonna have to think we’re joining the Mile High Club,” he says on a shrug, so casually, like the idea of a plane full of strangers thinking he’s dating Shane doesn’t horrify him. “Or you can learn to hold it, like a grown up.”

“What if I have to poop?”

Ryan shifts to glare at him. “Shane. Can you take this seriously for like, _ten minutes_?”

“I’m taking it very seriously, Ryan,” Shane says, which isn’t technically a lie. “Bowel health is no joke.”

Ryan rolls his eyes. He scoots closer and turns up the TV with the remote. “Fine. Be an asshole. I’m going to watch two episodes of _Friends_ and then we’re going to do some awful and terrible experimenting and then as soon as we get home we’re going to go to a — witch, or something, and get her to fix it.”

“A _witch_?” Shane repeats, unable to keep his voice from raising an octave. “Ryan. _Ryan._ ”

“Nope,” Ryan tells him, turning up the TV again. “No more out of you. It’s TV time.”

Maybe in a bid to shut Shane up, maybe because it really does feel good to touch more, Ryan curls in on his side and hooks his top leg over Shane’s, half-rolling on top of him and tucking his head under Shane’s chin.

There’s immediately a flood of good-feeling, a wash of comfort and wellness and relaxation.

 _It’s like a syringe full of heroin_ , Shane thinks, too swept up in how lovely it is to feel anything other than bemused.

Ryan goes limp and heavy, and Shane thinks he might have passed out. He has the right idea. Everything seems so easy, suddenly — sure, this is an unfixable problem, and Shane’s whole life is probably ruined, but here is Ryan sleeping on top of him, and the bed is comfortable, and the feeling that the contact is giving him is maybe worth all of it, so Shane closes his eyes and follows Ryan into sleep.

—

They hadn’t set an alarm, so Shane wakes up to loud, insistent knocks on the window. Startled and bleary from sleep, Shane untangles himself from where Ryan has more or less crawled on top of him during their nap, stands, and pads over to the door, yanking it open and hissing, “ _What_?” in a bid not to wake Ryan.

It’s TJ, and he doesn’t say anything, just looks at Shane, then the bed that Ryan is sleeping in, and then the other bed, with clearly unmussed sheets. He points at the unmussed bed. “I KNEW IT,” he crows. “I fucking _knew it_ , Devon owes me forty-two dollars, I knew it I knew it I knew it!”

Shane rubs at his eyes tiredly, still trying to blink the fog out of them that always gathers when he sleeps in contacts. “Shhhhhh,” he scolds. “Don’t wake Ryan up. What are you talking about?”

“Don’t give me that bullshit,” TJ tells him, pushing inside. “You guys were _all over_ each other after your fall today, and you’ve been grumpy all weekend. You fought and then after you fell you realized how stupid it was and then you came back here for make-up sex, right?”

Shane stares at him.

Behind him, Ryan grumbles crankily, shifting and reaching out, clearly for —

Shane looks down, coming awake very quickly as he realizes: Ryan is reaching out for Shane, because they aren’t touching. They _aren’t touching_ , and Shane feels fine. He doesn’t feel good, his head hurts, the nap was too long, but he can hear, and talk, and isn’t paralyzed with agony.

Holy shit, they’re cured! They’re free! They’re —

“ _Right_?” TJ asks insistently. “Shane? You can tell me, dude. It’s cool. I’ll keep my mouth shut, although I don’t think HR is gonna give a shit, we all already knew you guys were — ”

Ryan’s eyes are open. He’s staring at Shane with the same look of mixed delight and surprise on his face that Shane probably has. TJ is looking between them like maybe he thinks it’s about him, which — fine. Let him think that. Shane doesn’t care.

“Listen Teej,” Ryan starts to say, and then, before he can say anything else, Shane hears a distant ringing. Ryan’s eyes snap back to his, wide and terrified. “Shane,” he says.

The ringing gets louder. There’s a sharp tingling in Shane’s hands.

 _No_ , he thinks, and refuses to move. No, they’re cured, they’re _cured_. It was psychosomatic, and now that they’ve had time to recover from the trauma of the fall, it’s going to be fine. They don’t have to talk about it. Shane can shove away the memories of Ryan tangled up in him, Ryan holding his hand, Ryan saying _Shane_ , and it will all be fine.

The ringing gets louder. The tingling spreads and becomes sharper.

“ _Shane_ ,” Ryan says again, louder, more panicked. He sits up, not looking away, ignoring TJ.

“It’s fine,” Shane tells him firmly, giving his hands a shake. “No, listen — it’s fine, it’s — it’s all in our _heads_ , Ryan, we just have to recognize that and face it, we just have to acknowledge that it’s only chemicals interacting — ”

Ryan starts walking towards him and Shane backs away. “Everything is fucking chemicals interacting!” he snaps. “Love, hunger, fear, everything is chemicals but that doesn’t mean it’s not — ”

Shane’s hearing cuts out.

He watches Ryan close his eyes for a second, then open them again, determined. His mouth is still moving, still saying something, but Shane can’t hear it. He reaches out right as the pain hits, dragging Shane against him until he’s hugging him. Shane only feels it for a moment, but it’s enough to make him stumble, leaning more heavily into Ryan than he means to, burying his face in Ryan’s neck before he can stop himself.

“... idiot,” Ryan is saying, voice shaky. “It doesn’t matter what you _want to believe_.”

Shane wraps his arms around Ryan’s shoulders and pulls him in tight, the press of their chests like a salve, like a warm word after a scolding.

“Uh,” TJ says. “Okay. So. There’s a lot going on here, obviously.”

Shane lifts his head, blinking slowly at TJ. He’d forgotten he was there, honestly. He looks down at Ryan and tries to communicate _we can lie our way out of this_ with his eyebrows. He just needs a moment to think of something, a joke or — whatever. TJ is good at his job but he’s not Sherlock Holmes, and Shane can think of something.

What Shane cannot do is pretend to be Ryan’s boyfriend, because he’s repressed but he’s not a fucking _masochist_.

Ryan looks back at him, face determined and nervous and resigned, and he shrugs. Shane’s heart constricts. “Ryan, don’t,” he says, before he can stop himself, hating the way his voice sounds, how obviously it’s a plea.

But Ryan must still be smarting from earlier, from Shane throwing _no homo_ in his face, because he keeps looking at Shane with that stupid expression on his face, and he says, “Yeah TJ. You’re right about everything. We’re together. I got scared after the fall this morning so we came back here to ... calm down.”

Shane closes his eyes, briefly.

“‘Calm down,’” TJ repeats, using finger quotes. “Yeah. I’ll bet.”

“I’m going to kill you,” Shane mutters, “in an extremely terrible and agonizing way that I haven’t yet identified.”

“He’s a very private person,” Ryan tells TJ without looking at him. “This isn’t how we wanted it to come out.” He is still glaring up at Shane, looking so — looking _so_ —

Shane doesn’t know. He has no idea what Ryan is thinking, or feeling, or _doing_. 

TJ makes a mouth-zipping motion and pretends to throw away the key. Then he makes a reconsidering face. “Well, I mean, my lips are sealed theoretically, but speaking in a more literal sense, Mark and Devon and I have been talking about this for the last two and a half hours.”

Ryan finally looks away from Shane and pulls back, a little, sliding his hand down Shane’s arm to his hand and taking it, intertwining their fingers. He studies their hands thoughtfully, then looks up at Shane, a considering expression on his face.

Shane feels very adrift. He has no idea what he’s supposed to do, here. He has no idea what Ryan wants to do. He has no idea what he _himself_ thinks they should to do. He follows Ryan’s gaze down to their hands and thinks suddenly: _fuck it._

Fuck it!

If Ryan is going to throw out the rules, if Ryan is going to just do whatever he feels like, if Shane is stuck here because avoidance is literally impossible, fine. Then Shane is going to get what he goddamn wants, for once.

Maybe it’s just the high from all the contact or maybe it’s just that he’s at the end of his fucking rope, but Shane hears himself huff out a broken, half-hysterical laugh and ask, “Tell you what, Teej, will you tell them something for me?”

TJ frowns. “Sure, man. What?”

And Shane shakes loose Ryan’s grip, wraps his hands around the back of his neck, and drags him forward into a kiss.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> find me on [tumblr](https://itsvarnes.tumblr.com)!


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “What’s the third theory?” Shane calls to him, scuffing his foot.
> 
>  _The third theory is that you could be in love with me,_ Ryan thinks, but isn’t ready to say, is pretty sure Shane isn’t ready to hear.
> 
> “It needs further research,” he says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THEY'RE IN LOVE!!! IT'S SO EMBARRASSING FOR THEM!!!!

Shane is kissing him.

Shane is ... _really_ kissing him, holy shit.

For a moment, Ryan doesn’t react other than to stand absolutely still, the way he might if he saw an animal he didn’t want to scare away.

Somewhere to his left, TJ jokes, “Aw, he’s shy,” and that wakes Ryan right up, moves his hands from being stiff at his side to come up around Shane’s waist, and it’s —

It’s good, in a surprising way, in a way Ryan hadn’t expected kissing Shane to be; not because he thought Shane would be a bad kisser but because he had a hard time picturing Shane so _serious_ , so focused, his whole attention on this one thing. Shane was capable of great attention but it was almost never _sole_ attention. Ryan was the king of hyperfixation but Shane was capable of paying attention to so many things at once.

But here they were, Ryan’s head tipped back and Shane’s grip on his hair just a shade too tight, like he was holding Ryan in place. As if there was anywhere else on the planet that Ryan had any desire to be.

Ryan has Shane the way he wants him (close), but not _how_ he wants him (freely); he thinks maybe Shane has Ryan how he wants (freely) but not the _way_ he wants (sure). Ryan is confident this will hurt more than any curse when he lets himself think about it, but right now, staring into the dark hallways of how Shane feels about him, it just seems ... very human.

Human and tender and absurd.

 _I’m not going anywhere,_ Ryan thinks at him, pushing up on his tiptoes to prove it, biting down, a little sharply, on Shane’s bottom lip and shifting his hands so they can slip up under the bottom of Shane’s shirt. He shouldn’t, he knows he shouldn’t, he knows this isn’t really _his_ , just something he has stolen, something maybe he willed into existence out if pure and ferocious wanting, but he didn't care, just now. He wants to touch Shane, he wants to touch _Shane,_ not Shane’s t-shirt. The second Ryan makes contact with Shane’s skin, the — curse, or whatever, lights up with unbridled delight, and it’s —

Well, it’s kind of what Ryan imagines people who have sex while on LSD or something must feel, honestly. Like he can see colors through his hands where they’re touching: the dark blue ocean of _Shane_ , the threads of gold sunlight running through him, the whitecap ridges of his spine. Ryan thinks maybe he is seeing things more clearly now, with his eyes closed, than he has during all these long weeks of panicked silence. He runs his hand up Shane’s back to the base of his neck and every inch of skin is a bright spectrum of color and light; it’s like seeing the insides of him, all the twisting corridors of his brain, as complex and peculiar as the Winchester House.

Shane starts to pull back but Ryan doesn’t let him, holding him tighter, not letting him back away because he thinks maybe he is on the verge of understanding something very important.

 _I could live in this house,_ Ryan thinks dizzily, _I would keep building forever if you’d let me._

TJ says, “Uh, okay! Well. I get the message. I will ... pass it on. In a more verbal way than it was delivered to me. I feel confident that I can paint a picture.”

It breaks the spell, a little, and Ryan feels the edges of his breakthrough fading away, unsolved. He notes TJ letting himself out, tip-toeing. This time when Shane pulls back, slowly, their lips dragging against one another reluctantly, Ryan lets him go. But he makes himself meet Shane’s eyes and not look away, because he knows, now, that this will be important, that Shane needs him to be calm, that Shane needs him to be _sure_ , even though he isn’t, even though Ryan has no idea at all what he is doing.

This is what he knows: Shane’s mouth is blurry and red, and it’s Ryan’s fault. He wants to keep it red. He wants it never to heal all the way.

“Sorry,” Shane mumbles. “Jesus, I — uh. I shouldn’t have ... ” He gestures in a kind of flapping way but still holding tight to Ryan with one hand.

That’s true, probably, but Ryan is beginning to suspect that Shane _wanted to_ , and that’s —

He thinks back to Shane standing in front of him in the Canyon saying, _I didn’t start it. I would never._ But Ryan’s _Unsolved_ senses are tingling, abuzz from Shane’s mouth and the brush of insight that kissing him had brought.

He doesn’t understand everything, but he has the beginnings of a theory.

“You don’t have to apologize. I started it.” This feels important to say; Shane gives him a startled look, but Ryan shrugs; he’s surprised by his own honesty, but maybe it’s the effect of the curse, because he can’t seem to stop: “When I touched your face, I was trying to tell you something, but I don’t think you heard me.”

He feels a little helpless to vocalize everything that he’s trying to say, all the things that are tied up in who Shane is and how suddenly Ryan had wanted to touch him, that night. It hadn’t been a new feeling but it had been propelled by new impetus, built on the way Shane’s laughing eyes were crinkled and beloved and familiar and, and, and.

Ryan is tired of thinking in lists when it is so easy to think about it in just one word: “I don’t know how else to say it yet. _Shane_ is the only thing that feels big enough.”

There is a long answering silence. Ryan would have panicked about this, ten minutes ago, would have tried to fill it with blabber; but now that he has seen a glimpse of Shane’s brain he thinks he can be patient. He thinks it must be impossibly hard to find your way out when you take a wrong turn in there, and the last month has been nothing but wrong turns for them.

“Ryan, are you _stoned_ right now?” Shane asks after a minute or so, sounding amused and gently exasperated, ruining the moment in extremely typical Shane fashion. But Ryan sees now: this is what Shane looks like when he is panicking and wrong-footed. “Are you like ... blazed on makeouts?”

Ryan raises his head to glare. He wants to hold on to his serenity about everything, but Shane pushing his buttons has always been particularly effective in bringing him back to earth. “You’re not _that_ good a kisser, asshole.”

“Apparently I am,” Shane tells him, eyebrows raised. “Maybe it’s the cu ... uh, maybe it’s this touch thing. It gets you kind of loopy when you have too much of it.”

Ryan shakes his head and levels a finger at Shane’s chest, prodding him with it. He takes the out that Shane is offering him, but only because it is Shane who is offering. “I think you’re projecting,” he says, aiming for flippant and landing somewhere close to hopeful. “Also, don’t think I didn’t clock you calling it a curse, because I did.”

“Damnit,” Shane mutters. “Hoisted by my own petard.”

“Hoisted by your — dude, _what_?”

“You heard me.”

“Yeah I _heard_ you but literally half the shit you say is unintelligible to me.”

Shane laughs, and it feels oddly new and wonderful. Ryan doesn’t want to move, but he is also conscious that they have to figure out what they’re going to do about tomorrow because he cannot face going through TSA feeling like he does when the curse kicks in.

Luckily, Ryan investigates conspiracies and the supernatural for a living, and he’s had some thoughts forming since he woke up and Shane was on the other side of the hotel room. He pulls back just enough to be able to meet Shane’s eyes and says, “So I have some theories.”

Shane lets out a long and gusty, but not exactly impatient, sigh. “Of course you do. Okay, give ’em to me, little guy. Hit me with ’em.”

Ryan is a little embarrassed by the first one, but evidence is evidence. “Theory one: I think the curse values quality over quantity.”

Shane blinks. “ ... Quality of _what_?”

“Of _touches_ , stupid. I think there’s like, a sliding scale. At the low end is something simple, like holding hands. At the top end is — well, kissing, for example.”

“Well that’s — just — _very_ off-brand for ghost curses. But it’s good to see they’re branching out to reach different audience demographics. Though I’m not sure that getting into the already oversaturated dating market is a great idea for them.”

Ryan rolls his eyes, but takes his usual tack with Shane’s digressions, which is to ignore them. “The second theory is that’s why we were able to separate before. We’d been snuggling for like two hours, so we were able to be apart for a few minutes. I haven’t worked out the exact ratio.”

“But I’m sure you’re planning to,” Shane predicts dryly. “Okay. This theory fits, excepting that I don’t believe it’s a curse and therefore it cannot have an agenda. But sure. This _folie à deux_ that we are currently in the middle of is tied to intimacy levels of touching. The brain is a complex and ultimately unknowable organ; I’ll buy it.”

Ryan doesn’t feel like debating whether it’s a curse or a case of very small mass hysteria, so he just takes Shane’s acquiescence at face value and says, “Okay. So let’s separate, as a test. We’ll see how far we can get, and for how long.”

Shane hesitates, then gently pulls his hands away. Ryan braces for impact, but there’s nothing; the good feeling hums along for a few seconds, then peters out, and he’s left just — normal. Shane’s face lights up. “Go to the other side of the room,” he commands, and Ryan obeys.

“Still nothing,” he reports. “Your end?”

“Five by five, baby.” Shane opens the door and steps out into the gravel. When nothing happens, he takes a few more steps. Still nothing. A few more. “You good?”

“I’m tired and I’ve got weird PTSD cottonmouth, but I’m not blind so I’m taking the W,” Ryan decides. “Take a few more steps back and you’ll be about how far away you’d be if I got stuck in front of the metal detector and you got all the way through to the end.”

Shane obeys, backing up until he’s on the other side of the parking lot. Ryan is flooded with relief to know that he feels fine; no tingling, no headache, no impaired vision.

They can do this.

“Final report?” he calls.

“That’ll a big thumbs up from me.” Shane demonstrates by, in fact, giving Ryan a big thumbs up with one hand and pointing at it with the other. “We are going to be kings of the Transportation Security Association. Absolutely unstoppable.”

Ryan grins. “The Security Boys,” he deems them. “Got a nice ring to it.”

“It makes it sound like we’re running a bouncer temp agency,” Shane laughs. “The Security Boys, here to take care of all your late night, LA-douche expulsion needs.”

He starts walking back toward Ryan, but Ryan holds up his hands in a halting gesture and Shane obeys, stopping so suddenly that he sways forward. “Wait! Stop, go back. We have to see how long — we have to figure out how much time we earned.”

Shane reverses course, frowning down at the gravel. “How come you get to wait in the hotel room and I have to sit on a bunch of rocks?” he asks. “Labor practice at The Security Boys, LLC sucks. I want to unionize.”

“I support collective bargaining rights,” Ryan encourages him. “Unfortunately, I myself don’t want to collectively bargain, so it looks like you’re the union leader and its only member.”

“Fuck, I don’t want to be union leader. My member base is such an asshole about paying his dues.”

Ryan laughs. It’s good to do this with Shane, without cameras, without anyone looking, without feeling like it’s just a performance of their friendship. They’re best friends, and they’re not going to stop being best friends just because they had a fight and almost died in a canyon and are now supernaturally bound together by ghosts.

They’re not going to stop being friends just because Ryan is probably in love with him.

“If only you’d let ghosts unionize,” Ryan teases. “I hear those dicks in the Sallie House really hate TSB upper management. I heard they’ve got him real spooked.”

Shane levels him with a glare. “I can’t let ghosts unionize, Ryan, because that would be fraud,” he says. “And not even good fraud, _obvious_ fraud. Using dead people to fake a paper trail is like, embezzlement and money laundering 101.”

Trust Shane to be offended not by the crime but by the lack of originality in the crime. Ryan rolls his eyes.

With all this space between them, it feels a little easier to breathe, a little less fraught. Up close, Ryan gets tangled up in all the pieces of the myriad ways he feels about Shane and who they are together; from a distance, he can see him more clearly, the sum of all his parts.

He thinks back to the Winchester House of Shane’s brain, to the curvature of his spine, to how clearly he could see him using only his hands: Shane close enough to touch like that because he’d put himself there, because he’d drawn Ryan in despite not knowing his welcome, because he was feeling flustered and emotional and _impulsive_.

If only he’d had just a little more time. If only Shane hadn’t pulled away right when Ryan was on the verge of _seeing._

“What’s the third theory?” Shane calls to him, scuffing his foot.

 _The third theory is that you could be in love with me_ , Ryan thinks, but isn’t ready to say, is pretty sure Shane isn’t ready to hear.

“It needs further research,” he says.

—

They manage ten minutes before the tingling comes back, and don’t wait to see how long it takes to go from a warning to a crisis. The second Ryan feels it, he’s back on his feet from where he’d been sitting cross-legged and Shane is taking huge strides into the hotel room, drawing him in and tucking his head in close. By unspoken agreement, they sleep in Ryan’s bed, tangled as closely together as they can get.

“It’s like charging your phone before a long flight,” Ryan reasons. “If we cuddle all night, and sit next to each other in the car on the drive back to Phoenix, we’ll be totally fine through security.”

“Easy peasy lemon squeezy, Reezy Bergeezy,” Shane agrees in a bland tone that Ryan doesn’t quite trust. He crawls gamely into bed and wraps his arms around Ryan’s middle, nuzzling the back of his neck almost like he’s not realizing he’s doing it; the first piece of evidence for Ryan’s collection. They fall asleep quickly, and Ryan at least sleeps through the night — when the alarm goes off in the morning, Shane is already awake, which Ryan can tell because he’s holding himself very, very still, his mouth open and wet where it is pressed against Ryan’s bare bicep.

Ryan lies still for a few moments. “Shane,” he says eventually, the same way he always has.

“Yeah,” Shane answers, voice a little hoarse, the way it is when they’ve spent the night in a house and Ryan’s loud panicking has kept him up all night. His eyes, sleepy on the best of days, are so wrinkled with exhaustion that it’s obvious he’s been up late staring at the ceiling and cycling through whatever thoughts he’s having. Ryan goes to the gym when he’s panicking, runs or lifts or does push-ups until it burns up and drips off him like sweat, but that doesn’t work for Shane, because he doesn’t panic; he spirals. He thinks and thinks and thinks and thinks until he can untangle the knots.

Gently and slowly enough that Shane won’t startle, Ryan reaches out to press his thumb to the corner of his right eye, dragging it outward to nab some of the sleep that’s gathered there. “You had a gugg,” he explains, not removing his hand.

Shane is blinking at him, face open with bewilderment.

 _He doesn’t know_ , Ryan realizes. He’s been panicking that the Face Touching Incident had told Shane everything, and that Shane’s rejection of it had been just as comprehensive. But — here they are, twined like this, Ryan’s arm fast asleep under the weight of Shane’s side, and still Shane is looking at him with confusion. Shane hadn’t understood at all.

“Ryan, with all due respect, what the sweet fuck is a gugg?” Shane asks eventually, which is almost certainly not the question Ryan thinks he wanted to ask.

“It’s — you know, a little sleep guggie. A gugg.”

“That’s not what those are called, I don’t think.”

Ryan rolls his eyes. “Sure, not in like, _textbooks_ , but you go ahead and tell Mama Bergara that she’s been misnaming eye guggies for at least twenty-nine years and see where that gets you.”

Shane laughs, rolling over onto his back and arching a little so that Ryan can pull his arm out. “Sir, I will not,” Shane says. “Wisdom is the better part of valour, and I know when I’m outmatched.”

It feels — Ryan is warm, and cuddled, and they’re just talking like it’s not weird to be tangled up in one another. It feels exactly like it could, if it were something different. Something small and secret sparks up in his chest, bright with hope. Ryan has Shane, for now: he has him as close as he wants him, sometimes closer. They haven’t killed each other yet. He can keep saying _Shane_ until Shane hears what he is saying.

Ryan’s phone buzzes. It’s Devon; the crew is ready to go, and are driving round to pick them up.

“We’ve got to get going,” he announces regretfully. “They’re on their way. I think we tell them you’re too concussed and I’m too shaken to drive ... I don’t want to use up all the touch charge just driving back to Phoenix.”

Shane snorts. “Or we could just tell them we boned all night and neither one of us is up to the task of sitting in the driver’s seat.”

Ryan levels him with a stern look as he pushes up into a sitting position, pushing his hand flat down onto Shane’s belly for leverage and eliciting a surprised _oof!_ as he does. Once he’s balanced, he flips his hand over for Shane to take, then stiffens his arm so Shane can pull himself upward.

They sit for a second, touching from knee to hip and then back up to their shoulders. It feels good. Ryan is relaxed and happy; if he’d known that all he needed to do to conquer anxiety was feel up Shane for a while, he’d have gotten them cursed ages ago.

“We’ve got to change,” Shane murmurs. “They’re going to wonder if they think we slept in our clothes.”

Ryan looks down and realizes Shane is right; God, they’d both slept in _jeans_. Ryan’s mother would be appalled.

Getting ready is a bit of an adventure. Ryan stands with his hand flat on Shane’s back, turned away while he pees and washes his hands and then they switch; Ryan doesn’t really want to think about what’s going to happen when one or both of them has to take a shit, and says no to the breakfast bar Shane offers him in a vague attempt to put it off. Getting their shirts on involves Ryan standing on Shane’s toes so that their hands can be free, and they settle on leaning their foreheads together while they deal with their lower half. This seems like a great idea that frees up their hands and feet until Ryan’s mouth is close enough to Shane’s that he can feel his breath as they both strip down.

Ryan does his best not to look. He wants to, but it feels voyeuristic, and anyway he doesn’t want the curse to get any ideas; if he’s right that they’re operating on a carrot-vs-stick system of forced intimacy, he doesn’t want to open the door to how it would feel about Ryan adjusting his head while they’re like this, half-naked and still sleepy and so so close.

“Ryan,” Shane murmurs, his voice faintly amused. “Breathe, buddy.”

“Fuck you,” Ryan answers immediately. “I _am_ breathing.”

“Hmm,” says Shane.

Irritated, Ryan blows out a long, obnoxious, morning-breath-scented mouthful at Shane’s face; he flinches back but doesn’t pull away. “Fuck your hmm,” Ryan grumbles. “I’m breathing. It’s a new situation, okay.”

He can feel rather than see Shane’s eyebrows rising. “Oh, this is new for you? I get bound to my buddies all the time. It’s just a little thing I like to do. Kind of a bonding experience, like fishing, or whatever it was you did in your fraternity.”

“Drink and puke, mostly,” Ryan reflects dryly. “Honestly, I’m not sure that wasn’t worse. At least I’m with you.”

“Aw, that’s sweet.”

“It’s not that sweet,” Ryan mutters. He pauses and takes a deep breath, stuffing both his feet into his clean pants and pulling them up without his customary hop so as not to dislodge Shane. The problem is that he’s having a hard time seeing the button, and he’s irritated so he knows he’s moving too fast, but he can’t make himself just take a breath and calm down.

After a couple of seconds, Shane reaches out and bats Ryan’s hands away. Before Ryan can ask what he’s doing, he feels his fingers on the lip of his jeans, tugging them in and fastening the button. “It _is_ sweet,” Shane repeats, voice softer this time, lower, more sincere.

Ryan feels like he’s paralyzed. The place low on his abdomen where Shane’s wrist had brushed is buzzing.

“I — ”

The knock on the door startles both of them into straightening, and they must both be getting used to things, because they reach out at the same time, automatically, to grab hands.

Ryan looks down at them. “This is going to look so stupid with the luggage,” he says, sighing. “TJ is gonna give us _so much_ shit.”

Shane nods carefully, glancing at the door. “We have a long ride back to Phoenix,” he points out. “We could — use up a little now. Recharge in the car.”

But this feels like a concession on Shane’s part, and Ryan is determined to prove — well, he’s not sure what, exactly, but something. So he shakes his head. “No,” he says, “let him be an asshole about it, I don’t care. I’m just saying.”

They struggle to get through the door without letting go of one another, but they manage, and to Ryan’s surprise nobody says a word about it when they get to the car. Instead, Devon meets his eyes in the rearview mirror — she’s driving — and smiles.

It’s nice.

It’s ... really nice, actually; Ryan feels almost a little sad about how nice it is, because of course he and Shane are not really dating, and they’re holding hands not because they’re riding the high of being newly made up from a fight but because they literally don’t have any other choice.

But — if Ryan’s theory is right — maybe it could be nice like this, later on; maybe, if he can convince Shane to listen to him, if he can figure out how to say things in a way that will make Shane _understand_ , this doesn’t have to be the only way that Ryan ever gets to have this. It could be a trial run, rather than a farce.

(Ryan is, at the root of things, an optimist.)

He squeezes Shane’s hand, and Shane looks over at him in question as they pull out of the park. Ryan shakes his head, but smiles and swipes his thumb back and forth across Shane’s hand. Things are quiet for the first hour of so of the drive, Ryan leaning heaving into Shane and giving Mark shit about his terrible radio choices up front.

“I am the only person in this car with anything approaching good music taste,” Ryan laments, and then reassess. “Shane makes good playlists. I don’t know if you even like what’s in them half the time, though.”

“Playlist curation is an art that transcends personal taste,” Shane answers primly. “You build a museum exhibit around thematic and stylistic exploration, not just a hodgepodge of shit you like.”

TJ snorts. “Okay, easy, tiger,” he says. “They’re good; they’re not _Van Gogh_.”

“Obviously not, because Van Gogh was a painter,” Shane agrees, serene. “It’s an entirely different artistic medium. Apples and oranges, you inveterate fool.”

“But we are all fruit,” Ryan chimes in before he can stop himself, and when three heads swivel to stare at him disbelievingly he says: “Fuck all of you, _My Big Fat Greek Wedding_ is a classic.”

“Aw, you’re such a romantic, Ryan,” Devon teases. “Shane, is he a cornball in private, because low-key I always assumed he’d be really embarrassing. Like, worse than Ned.”

Shane goes stiff for a second, then visibly forces himself to relax. “No, it’s all a front,” he tells her. “He wants you to think he’s doting, but most of the time it’s all, ‘Shane, let’s spend a romantic night on a dusty floor in a house that I sincerely believe has ghosts in it,’ and, ‘Shut up, Shane, you’re relentless skepticism is exhausting, Shane,’ and, ‘Aliens were present at the Battle of Alesia, Shane.’”

“Fuck off, I’m an _excellent_ goddamn boyfriend,” Ryan protests. “It’s nonstop romance. I took him on a treasure hunt! I wore an eye patch _on camera_.”

Shane’s eyes go a little soft, which Ryan catalogues to remember later and marks down as further evidence. “I liked you in the eye patch,” Shane says. “You looked like a very confusing sexual fantasy I had in high school about the baseball team taking to the high seas under my command.”

Maybe he’s just committing to the lie; it’s not impossible. Shane is a better actor than people give him credit for. But Ryan doesn’t think so. Ryan squeezes his hand.

“That feels like a sexual dynamic we should discuss either privately while naked or with a therapist, fully clothed,” he jokes.

“D’aww,” says TJ. “You crazy kids and your sexual deviance just warm my heart.”

“Anything is okay as long as it is safe, sane, and consensual,” Shane rattles off cheerfully.

“ _Some_ one’s been watching Just Between Us _._ ”

Shane shrugs. “What can I say? I’m loyal.”

Ryan rolls his eyes and let’s it go, because they are coming up on Sedona and Ryan is a sucker for scenery. The car quiets, and the red rocks rise up out of the desert, and he nestles into Shane a little. It’s nice. Shane is warm and Ryan is allowed to snuggle him — _has_ to snuggle him, kind of.

He expects Shane to stiffly accept Ryan's affection in that disgruntled cat way of his, but instead he shifts, transferring Ryan’s grip to his far hand and then slinging his left arm over Ryan’s shoulder, drawing him close.

“Aww,” says TJ, again.

“Shut up,” Ryan and Shane mutter at the same time, and something sparks again in Ryan’s chest, warm and bright.

—

Everything goes so well initially at the airport, Ryan starts to feel like maybe this curse thing won’t have to be the end of the world, even if they can't get it fixed. It’s probably selfish to be perversely glad that he'll have a reason to keep Shane with him forever, no matter what happens with _Unsolved._

Sure, it will present some logistical challenges, but they’re enterprising. They can figure it out.

He is imagining rosy years of them sitting on a porch, holding hands while Shane shouts at the neighborhood children to get off their lawn, when Shane looks down at his ticket while they’re in the pre-check line and says, “Shit.”

Ryan frowns. “What?” Shane holds his phone up, tapping his finger at the top. Ryan doesn’t see anything, and it’s his turn, so he pushes through the swinging gate and goes to the ID checking lady, who gives his license a cursory glances and saves him through, scribbling on his ticket.

He turns to grab Shane’s hand, but Shane —

Shane is held up, looking sheepish and resigned. “Yeah,” he’s saying. “I just noticed. It almost always comes through.”

“Sir,” an agent tells Ryan, “you can’t wait here.”

“My friend,” Ryan tells her, pointing at Shane. “I’m just —”

“He can meet you on the other side of security,” she interrupts, with limited patience. “But you’re impeding the other travelers.”

Ryan feels a stab of panic, and Shane is shuffling back along the line, waiting for him in the corner behind the baggage x-ray machine. Ryan goes in that direction, getting out of the way and dodging the TSA lady’s glare.

“Dude, what the fuck?” he hisses. “What happened? What’s wrong with your ticket?”

“I didn’t get pre-check,” Shane explains. “I didn’t even notice, and I guess in the group the guard didn't either — I have to go through regular security.”

Ryan can feel himself starting to shake. “But — that’s so far away,” he blurts, even though the crew can hear him. “Shane. I don’t know if — ”

“It’ll be okay,” Shane assures him gently. “We’re like supercharged right now, and security didn’t look too bad. It’s ten minutes, tops. C’mon, Ry, trust your union rep. The Security Boys got this.”

He cracks a grin, seeming so calm and sure, and Ryan hates him, a little. He can’t stand the thought of the pain hitting them in the airport, especially can’t stand the thought of it happening to Shane while he’s alone, so far away from anybody and unable to hear or explain what is happening and that he needs to be brought to Ryan.

There are so many people and the crew is starting to hoist their bags onto the belt, and Ryan — he knows that Shane is just going to walk away, to put himself at risk rather than ask for what he isn’t sure Ryan is willing to give, so he drops his backpack off his shoulder, turns his baseball cap around backwards, reaches up to grab Shane’s neck, and yanks him down into a kiss.

Someone wolf-whistles. Ryan doesn’t care. The curse lights up between them, sucking Ryan down into the heat of Shane’s stupid mouth, and his panic dissolves in the face of the way that Shane’s body softens under his grip, the way his hands come up to cup around Ryan’s face, so unbearably tender that it breaks Ryan’s heart a little.

Ryan presses in closer, chasing down how clearly he can see the lights in the hallways of Shane’s mind turning on, feeling like he’s seeing things for the first time, like their friendship has been happening in a badly-lit room that’s suddenly flooded with sunlight.

It’s so easy to _see_ , like this, his hands flat against Shane’s skin, every freckle and bone its own form of Braille lettering: Shane being careful and solicitous and distant and miserable, Shane not touching him, Shane staying out of Ryan’s space not because he didn’t want to be in it but because he thought he wasn’t allowed.

Ryan feels drunk on understanding. He can see that night playing out, but he’s looking at himself, at his own arm outstretched, and his heart is hammering not with panic because he _doesn’t_ want to be touched but because —

Holy shit, because —

Shane pulls back when an agent barks at him, blowing out a slow breath. He’s staring at Ryan with a stricken expression on his face — not panicked, but unsettled, the way he’d never admit he looks on hunts when he hears a noise he can’t explain.

 _Spooked_ , Ryan’s mind supplies.

Jesus Christ, he’s just fucking — Ryan is a demon house, and Shane is terrified to go in because he is afraid of not finding proof. He’s afraid of finding out it’s just a house, empty.

“That might do it,” Ryan manages, voice hoarse. “I’ll wait for you on the other side of security. As soon as you get through.”

 _Shane loves me,_ he thinks, sure of something for the first time in weeks. _Shane_ loves _me._

“I’ll see you soon,” Shane mutters, and doesn’t meet his eyes before turning round and loping back toward check-in.

—

“Ryan, chill out,” TJ says. “Shane will meet us at the gate.”

Ryan shakes his head. He’s having trouble swallowing, anxiety thrumming through his whole body like a vibrating guitar string. He isn’t in pain yet — nothing is even tingling, but it feels like it’s been an hour, although his watch insists it’s been only a handful of minutes. Their gate is in an entirely different section of the airport, and Ryan knows it doesn’t make sense that he’d refuse to go without Shane, but he doesn’t care.

He just — he doesn’t care. He’s not leaving him. Not now that he knows that Shane — how Shane feels.

“You guys go ahead,” he says. “I’m gonna wait.”

TJ sighs, giving him a look, but Devon smiles fondly and ruffles his hair a little. Mark studies him quietly for a few seconds and then lets it go, shrugging; the three of them head off to find the gate.

Ryan sits in one of the chairs and waits. He can’t see how far back the line goes; he can’t see Shane. It’s the first time that Shane has been out of his eyesight since — well, since before the fall, which was somehow only yesterday. Ryan has gotten used to the feel of Shane’s hand in his, the way he hunches slightly over Ryan’s shoulders when they’re standing still, his long strides that kind of tug Ryan along when they walk.

It’s — Ryan is a tactile guy, is all. He’s always been better at showing than saying, at pulling his girlfriends close and kissing spots on their heads that aren’t their mouths: foreheads, temples, cheeks, noses. Places that say _I love you_ , that say _this part of you is precious to me_ , that say _all parts of you are precious to me_.

But Shane has never really been a hugger, isn’t much for the man-to-man pat on the back. He’s big on making jokes about how valuable their friendship is that are only half-jokes, and that’s been fine, for Ryan. He’s gotten it. It’s worked.

Except now — now he _knows_ , is the thing, he _knows_ what it’s like to have Shane’s hand in his, to have Shane enormous and gangly in bed while he sleeps. He knows what his mouth feels like, has touched his teeth with his tongue.

You can’t really _come back_ from that, in a bromantic sense.

Ryan notices his leg is bouncing at an alarming pace, so he pulls out his phone and types:

_how long’s the line?_

**_almost at the top. i’ll be through pretty quick_ **

_i’m right past the exit point. u can’t miss me._

**_it’ll be fine, ryan._ **

_u don’t fucking know that_

**_yes i do_ **

_how?_

**_because i’m much much smarter than you_ **

_fuck u_

_no ur not_

**_well i can spell “you,” for one thing_ **

_NOBODY LIKES A PRESCRIPTIVIST, SHANE_

“It’s not prescriptivism, it’s snobbery,” Shane’s voice says from above him, and Ryan’s head snaps up.

He feels —

God, it’s so stupid, but he feels like it’s been _days_. It seems crazy that he’s been apart from Shane less than ten minutes, but his watch is pretty firm about it. Ryan looks down at his hands; no tingles. He feels fine.

He reaches out and drags Shane to him anyway.

Ryan rests his head on Shane’s stomach, sagging against him, and Shane chuckles quietly. He brings a hand up to run through Ryan’s hair.

“Okay, hey,” he murmurs, voice gentle and warm. “It’s okay, buddy.”

“If — if it hadn’t worked,” Ryan mumbles, eyes closed. “You’d have been — I couldn’t have gotten to you, do you understand that you fucking psychopath — ”

“All right now, _psychopath_ is a bit harsh, and somewhat ableist, actually — ”

Ryan wraps his arms around Shane’s middle. “Shut _up,_ Shane,” he says. “I was — you’re so fucking _cavalier_ sometimes, even when — it’s one thing when you don’t believe that there’s, whatever, something there but this is — but you _know_ this could, fucking — maybe you don’t think it’s a curse. But it’s real, you _know_ it’s real, and you wouldn’t be able to _get to me_ — ”

Shane goes quiet, and still, while Ryan talks, and then suddenly reaches behind him to unlock Ryan’s hands from around his back, kneeling in front of him and holding both his hands in front of his chest. “Ryan,” he interrupts, voice low and serious. “I’m _fine._ Okay?”

“I know you’re fine,” Ryan grumbles. “That’s not the point.”

“What is the point?”

Ryan doesn’t know what the point is, actually, so instead of answering he tips forward and kisses Shane again, not to charge up but just because he wants to. It’s different than the other two: not stubborn like the first, not panicked like the second, but softer, slower, just Ryan trying to find a way to say _I was worried about you_.

Shane startles, a little, but then relaxes into it, giving Ryan’s hands a squeeze. He nudges his nose as he pulls back.

“We’re scandalizing the security guards,” he murmurs.

“I don’t give a shit,” Ryan answers. “You okay? No tingling?”

“No tingling,” Shane confirms. “C’mon, let’s find our gate.”

—

Shane sleeps on the plane, because Shane can sleep anywhere. Ryan can barely sleep anywhere, including his own house, so he stays away and mostly stares at Shane as if he could read answers in the curve of his jaw.

 _Shane loves me,_ he thinks, testing it out. It has been long enough since Ryan was kissing him that he can feel doubt creeping back in. But Ryan is low-key a detective for a living, so he stockpiles evidence against his own bias:

  * Shane’s warm eyes, laughing at him but going along with Ryan’s dumbass ideas anyway;
  * Shane’s terrible, labyrinthine brain, where he keeps building new rooms to escape his own ghosts;
  * Shane spending so many hours on the hotdaga just to get a rise out of Ryan, putting actual, real _production value_ into it;
  * Shane gamely going to location after location chasing something he doesn’t believe in;
  * Shane saying _we should head out_ , but looking at Ryan with startling tenderness while he did, tenderness peppered with what Ryan had taken at the time for pity but now he thinks was doubt.



It occurs to Ryan that things have been tender and sore between them because Shane is being a martyr and Ryan is being a coward and both of them are idiots.

Shane hadn’t heard him, hadn’t heard all the shades of his own name when Ryan said it.

Well, that was fine, Ryan thinks. He will just have to tell him again and again and again, until he hears it. Ryan is nothing if not persistent, and the upshot of being cursed by ghosts is that Shane can’t avoid him.

 _I’m gonna love the shit outta you, dude,_ Ryan thinks. _Just wait, asshole._

Shane sleeps on.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shane -- 
> 
> Well, he gets used to it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

Shane sleeps on the plane because Shane has not slept since before he and Ryan plunged off a cliff, excepting the couple hours’ nap they had in the hotel. He had lain awake all night, too distracted by the warmth of Ryan’s breath, the heat of his skin, and the extremely stupid way he half-mumbled his way through sleep, to be able to get his brain in order. New things kept cropping up that he wanted to remember, to frame and hang on a wall somewhere: Ryan’s head rubbing sleepily against his chest, itching his nose; the curve of Ryan’s arm folding under Shane’s side and his hand resting flat on Shane’s back, holding on and being held at the same time; the — curse, PTSD symptom, whatever, buzzing with delight everywhere that they were touching.

And, distantly, Ryan’s voice in his head: _I’m not going anywhere. I could live in this house. I would keep building forever if you’d let me._

It happens again at the airport, when Ryan is yanking him across the rope boundary and kissing him, mouth insistent and irritated and worried, his voice clear and sharp as if he was speaking: _I see you, I can see you, there are so many things I didn’t know._

And after security, Ryan surging forward and kissing him even though he didn’t have to, because both of them were fine: _I was worried about you._

This is crazy, of course. Shane knows it’s crazy. The idea that he can hear Ryan’s voice in his head is absolutely a part of the sustained mental break that Shane is currently experiencing, especially because Ryan has never been that upfront about anything in his life. He’s a stutterer, in moments of discomfort; it’s charming, which is annoying.

Shane is sure there is a medical term for whatever it is that is happening to him, to them, and he will find it when they land back in LA. Because as much as having Ryan this close, this _easy_ , is tempting, it’s also an obvious sign that Shane desperately needs a therapist. Possibly Shane needs _two_ therapists. A whole team.

When they are getting ready to land, Shane wakes up to Ryan staring at him — _studying_ him, almost, his thumb tracing around the ridges of Shane’s knuckles.

“How’d you sleep?” he asks, voice soft.

Shane blinks a couple times, trying to drag himself out of the haze of still being half asleep. Ryan’s face is close, and the lights of the plane are still off, just the two of them in a cocoon. It’s kind of cold, but Ryan is warm, has lifted the arm rest between them so that at some point Shane had sagged into him,  cheek pressed against his shoulder.

He shifts up and kisses him, too tired to think better of it, wanting to see what he can hear. Ryan takes it in stride. Ryan thinks — or Shane projects what he wants Ryan to be thinking? — _hi._

He pulls back. “Hi,” Shane echoes, waiting to see if Ryan noticed his own thought repeated back to him.

Ryan grins. “And you said I was overreacting to SecurityGate,” he teases. “Here you are being all anxious and worried just because you were asleep.”

“Y’all are truly sickening, just so you know,” Devon says from behind them. “Like you’re really kind of bumming me out about a whole bunch of my past relationships.”

Shane sits up, trying not to be too obviously embarrassed, but Ryan seems blithe. “Sorry you didn’t hop on the RyTrain, Dev,” he tells her breezily. “But it’s too late. We've pulled out of the _stashane._ ”

“Oh, Ryan, no,” Shane scolds. “C’mon, man.” He pauses, in part for the comedic timing and in part to give himself time to change his mind. But fuck it, he thinks. Apparently they’re both just doing and saying whatever the fuck comes into their heads, so. “You know the pullout method isn’t a reliable safe sex practice.”

Devon and TJ laugh, and he earns a patented Bergara wheeze, but there’s something extra in it, something surprised and —

“You’re right,” Ryan says, meeting his gaze and running his thumb up the palm of Shane’s hand and pressing into the edge of his wrist, firm as a word. “That’s ... not the right way to do things.”

Shane blinks.

Ryan is still sitting there, touching him like it’s on purpose, studying his face with a soft and serious expression. He blinks again. No change. Shane’s just either hallucinating with extreme prejudice  or — not.

“Uh,” Shane gurgles. “No.”

 _Smooth,_ he thinks at himself. _Well done, pal. You sure got him._

Ryan laughs and lets it go. He sits back in his seat and Shane settles in his own, staring out the window to keep himself from staring at the person who looks like Ryan and sounds like Ryan but cannot actually _be_ Ryan.

LA rises up beneath them, bright and familiar. They should stay at Shane’s, he decides, because Shane has a cat and more importantly Shane’s apartment doesn’t still contain furniture he owned in college. Ryan doesn’t put up much if a fight; he’s almost worrying blasé about the whole thing, in fact, following Shane gamely into a Lyft.

They order pizza. Ryan lets him pick the toppings. Ryan _never_ lets Shane pick the toppings, because Ryan is a massive control freak. Shane doesn’t even _want_ to pick the toppings; he likes letting Ryan do all the planning, because it means he doesn’t have to, and Shane is very pro not doing unnecessary work.

“Are you okay?” he asks carefully when the pizza arrives, with fucking pineapple and anchovies in it, a direct attack on Ryan’s solicitude that had only managed to elicit a shrug. Shane doesn’t particularly want to eat an anchovy and pineapple pizza, but he guesses if you’re in for a penny.

Ryan seems to genuinely think it over. “I could stand to charge up some,” he muses, and before Shane can take a bite or clarify that that wasn’t what he meant, Ryan has launched across the couch and is kissing him.

“Mmf,” Shane says, startled, but his hands are already coming up automatically to Ryan’s waist, slipping underneath his t-shirt, dragging them both back until Shane’s head is proposed against the armrest and Ryan is heavy on top of him, elbows propped up on either side of Shane’s ears, hands tangled in his hair.

It’s good that his body seems to be content to operate without much input from Shane's brain, because at this juncture Shane's brain is mostly a whirring sound overlaid with repeating question marks.

Shane feels a little dizzy with the idea that he could — let go, that he could take his hands away and still be touching in Ryan in so many places. He doesn’t understand why this is happening, can’t seem to make the Ryan of three weeks ago match the one currently laid out above him, whose tongue is dipping into Shane’s mouth.

 _Shane,_ Ryan’s voice is chanting in Shane’s head. _Shane. Shane. Shane. Shane. Shane._

It’s distracting but it’s also —

There are so many notes in it, said like this, over and over, in Ryan’s voice, his mouth warm and wet and soft against Shane’s own, his fingertips pressing into Shane’s scalp like he’s trying to make his prints permanent. _Shane_ like, “I love you,” _Shane_ like, “This part of you is precious to me,” _Shane_ like, “All parts of you are precious to me.”

Ryan pulls back. “That’s better,” he says, sounding satisfied. He’s looking down at Shane with a dopey smile on his face.

Shane feels very at a loss: logically, he knows that this has to be a PTSD thing, that it isn’t possible that Ryan could go from not-wanting to wanting _this fast_ , but also ... also a lot of weird things have happened in the last couple of days.

Shane has been happy to leave a lot of other mysteries unsolved. He’s never cared all that much about what the truth was; it was enough to have an opinion and call it quits.

Why can’t — Ryan is beaming down at him, fingers curling absently in his hair, and why _can’t_ Shane just — _have it_ , for as long as Ryan offers it, for as long as this thing lasts? Why shouldn’t he let his traumatized brain process the fall in whatever weird way it wants? _Ryan_ seems to be doing that, and look at him, he’s having a great time.

“Not for nothing,” Shane says, feeling still a little dazed, “but our relationship has really taken a turn I didn’t expect when we left for Arizona.”

Ryan laughs. “That’s because you weren’t paying attention,” he tells Shane matter-of-factly. “You’re never paying attention when I talk to you.”

“What, that’s bullshit, and slander besides,” Shane protests. They’re still just lying there. Ryan seems content, and Shane isn’t about to move him.  “I listen to you very closely, in point of fact. There are many hours of video to prove this. Conversely, I seem to recall a certain hotdog saga to which you are _openly_ dismissive — ”

Ryan groans, dropping his head to Shane’s chest and shaking it. Shane has a mouthful of Ryan’s terrible hair. He isn’t sure he’s ever been more comfortable. “The hotdoga isn’t you talking, it’s you _antagonizing_ ,” Ryan says.

“No, I love the hotdoga,” Shane says. He doesn’t mind, actually, that Ryan hates it — half its purpose is to make him hate it — but: “I genuinely derive joy from making it.”

“I know, buddy,” Ryan tells him fondly.  “I love that you love it.”

“But you do hate it.”

“Every second of it makes me want to stab my own ears with a pencil.”

Shane is filled with a weird kind of warmth. In a way, the fact that Ryan genuinely hates it is almost — better, because he hates it but he lets Shane do it anyway. He lets Shane take up almost _half_ the postmortems with it. He makes faces and he complains and he bitches endlessly, but he still makes sure it gets animated. He still makes sure to schedule enough time for them so that Shane can get through the whole thing.

“Genius is never understood it its own time,” Shane sniffs.

Ryan snorts, rolling his eyes when he lifts his head to look again at Shane. “Whatever, dude,” he mutters. He rests his chin on Shane's sternum, looking totally comfortable, like this is something they do and have always done, like this isn't Earth-shattering at all.

“We should set some boundaries,” Shane hears himself say, and immediately wants to throw himself out a window.

Ryan studies him, a little furrow in his brow. “If you want to, we can,” he says slowly.

Shane tries to figure out how to say it. It feels many-doored and complicated, almost impossible to filter down into something Ryan would understand. Shane thinks that he would have to begin with the start of the universe to fit it all in.

Still: he has spent three weeks not talking to Ryan, and he’s very tired of it. And — maybe it _is_ PTSD, but there is something in the way Ryan’s voice sounds in his head. Something warm and find and — and _sure_.

Shane just ... he really needs Ryan to be sure.

He says, “I don’t _want_ to, I just think we _should_.”

Ryan nods, his chin digging into Shane a little while he does. “Okay, big guy. Can — do you wanna clarify for me what exactly — ”

“I think we both went through a trauma, and relationships based on intense experiences never work,” Shane blurts out, and Ryan’s eyes go soft for a long moment before he frowns, suddenly.

“Wait, are you quoting the Keanu Reeves movie _Speed?_ ”

Shane is. Shane had sincerely hoped that Ryan wouldn’t notice.

“I think it was really more of a Sandra Bullock vehicle than a Keanu Reeves film,” he argues, just to be difficult. “But yes.”

“Dude — hold up, am I Sandra Bullock? Are _you_ claiming to be Keanu Reeves? Because objectively — if anyone — ”

“What’s wrong with Sandra Bullock?”

“Nothing, she’s just — I mean, that’s not the point, it’s, my point is that — ”

“She won an Oscar. She has an impressive body of work, Ryan. Show some respect.”

“Oh, what, you’re a big Sandra Bullock stan now? A real Bullock-head?”

Shane pinches the bridge of his nose. He’s laughing, but he’s also trying to orient himself in a world where Ryan is lying on top of him, casually arguing who gets to be Keanu Reeves in the narrative about why Ryan and Shane make out with each other, now.

Still, it feels good, to laugh, to bicker with Ryan and not feel like he’s being careful, or like he’s performing because they’re on camera.

Ryan is — fuck, Ryan is Shane’s best friend, and he’s _missed him_.

Ryan shifts, and he’s still on top of Shane, his thigh brushing against Shane’s dick, and Shane is pretty sure it’s ethically grey at best to take advantage of his moment but it’s not entirely impossible that neither one of them will ever get to have sex without the other again, so despite his best intentions, he makes a sound and arches up against it.

Ryan grins, stretching up to kiss his mouth and pressing down, settling a leg between Shane’s and adjusting again, giving a little half-wriggle that’s —

Well, it is certainly —

“Ryan,” Shane manages to say, not pulling away enough so it gets mostly swallowed. “Ryan. We’ve gotta — probably we should think this through, man.”

Ryan kisses him so fiercely that he’s overwhelmed with the weight of it, the clarity of Ryan’s voice saying, _What do I have to do to make you understand that I know what I am doing?_

“Look, it’s just,” Shane says. _Shut up!_ he shouts at himself. _Shut up, shut up, shut up!_

Ryan pulls back, sighing a little. “What?” he asks, grouchy. His mouth looks messy, glossy with kissing, and Shane can’t stand to look at it for more than three consecutive seconds.

Shane wants — Shane wants _so badly_ to have any brain but his own, but he doesn’t, so he makes himself say, “You’re my best friend. We went through a trauma together. It’s — I’m not saying — you’re very good at this, actually, but it is occurring to me that maybe we shouldn’t do anything we can’t take back later, if we decide this curse thing made us, I don’t know, sexually disposed to something we weren’t predisposed to.”

Ryan frowns. “You’ve had sex with dudes before,” he reminds Shane.

“...Yeeeeeeeeah,” Shane agrees, and then points out gently, “buddy, _you_ haven’t.”

And that’s the root of it, he thinks: Ryan always dives into things, head first. Shane has seen him conquer a thousand fears, has seen him go eyes wide open into a decision that he knows he’s going to regret, and Shane just.

He just doesn’t want to be one of them. He needs Ryan not just to be brave, but to be sure, to have thought it through.

“Maybe I have,” Ryan grumps, looking shifty.

Despite himself, despite the moment, despite the fact that Ryan is _still pressing against his dick_ , Shane laughs. “Have you?” he asks, eyebrows raised.

Ryan’s shoulders slump. “No,” he admits. “But it’s — only because I kept falling in love with women and it’s not like I _sleep around_.”

Something in Shane’s heart clenches. “Oh, Ryan.”

“Don’t _Oh Ryan_ me,” Ryan snaps. “You’re not exactly a fucking — Lothario.”

Shane tips his head back and laughs. “Dating is hard when you’re the last of the Sasquatch species,” he agrees. He takes a few deep breaths and reminds himself that he’s an adult, and this is an adult relationship, and it’s stupid not to be honest. So he collects his thoughts for a moment, then says: “Okay. Cards on the table. I want — I _do want_ , Ryan, but you may recall we just spent three weeks barely able to look at each other just because you _touched my face_ , so I don’t think it’s overcautious to say that we should ... be careful. Is all.”

“Be careful of _what_?” Ryan asks. “Dude. It’s like every time your brain opens a door there’s a whole new corridor behind it. Stop building long enough for me to get a feel for the fucking layout.”

Shane startles, flashing back to Ryan’s voice in his head: _I could live in this house. I would keep building forever if you’d let me._

But that’s — crazy, of course. They’re not really cursed. They’re traumatized. Shane can’t _really_ ... people don’t fall off cliffs and become psychic. That’s not how things work, and only in part because nobody at all is psychic, full stop.

“Be careful of _fucking it up_ ,” Shane snaps. “Not for nothing, man, but it’s really important that we don’t wake up one day and hate each other. Personally and professionally. And what if we figure out this touch thing and then it ... goes away? What if on the other side of it we realize that everything we were thinking and feeling was just — a coping mechanism?”

“Ah, yes,” says Ryan, voice laden with sarcasm, “the famous I Fell Off A Cliff And The Only Way To Deal With It Is To Make Out With My Best Friend disorder.”

“The workings of the human mind are still by and large not understood!”

Ryan sighs. “You think too fucking much,” he grumbles. “But okay. It’s not like I didn’t know that.” He rolls off to Shane’s side, sliding into the space between him and the back of the couch, head on Shane’s shoulder. “I have a theory.”

Shane huffs a laugh. Kind of without thinking, he brings his hand up and threads his fingers through Ryan’s hair. “What is it?”

“I think you’re scared to get what you want,” Ryan says, almost blandly.

Shane bites down on a reflexive joke. He’s quiet for a minute, still toying with Ryan’s hair, thinking about Ryan’s metaphor, his brain a house he keeps building rooms in so that he never has to turn around and go back the way he came.

“No,” he decides, quietly. “I’m scared to lose it.”

Ryan looks up at him. His eyes are warm, and patient, and even without kissing him Shane can hear exactly what he means when he says, “Then I guess we’ll have to make sure you don’t lose it.”

Shane closes his eyes. He nods.

Ryan says, “Hold the fuck — dude, did you get _anchovies and pineapple_?”

—

Ryan, because he is Ryan, does research. He sends Shane approximately eight hundred links to psychics and healers and some woman who claims to be an “urban hedge witch,” which Shane hates _right_ off the bat, but is (of course) Ryan’s favorite. She has her own website that looks like it was designed to be sold as a template on Etsy.

They sit side-by-side, using their laptops in one of the common spaces, close enough that they touch from knee to hip. Shane is expecting some odd looks about their proximity, but apparently he and Ryan are weird enough about each other regularly that nobody blinks twice.

_she says she’s got availability in two weeks!_

Shane gives Ryan a look. Jen and Sara are chatting on a nearby couch, planning some video about sleep cycles for As/Is that Shane is about 80% sure they’re only doing so that they can nap during the workday, which means he can't say out loud what he's thinking, but he wants to make sure Ryan gets the full effect of his tone.

**_ryan, she says her practice includes tumblr witchcraft. also i seem to remember you saying that you don’t believe in witches._ **

_ya well i didn’t believe in witches before we were shoved off a crater by a ghost but now i’m feeling a lot more open to the idea of things i previously found uncompelling._

**_we got knocked by a gust of wind. ryan i really need you to understand that we were not shoved off a cliff by ghosts._ **

_fuck u, dude_

_i can’t believe you’re pulling this_

_you don’t think there is ANY_   _possibility that we were shoved by an angry spirit?_

**_i don’t know what you want me to say, man. i agree that i cannot explain why we fell, but i don’t think it’s MORE likely we were pushed by ghosts than that we were knocked off our feet by the notoriously unpredictable weather in the canyon._ **

_you’re incredible._

**_thank you._ **

_we’re going to see desdemona._

“Oh come on,” Shane says incredulously, out loud. “Her name is _Desdemona_?”

Ryan glares at him.

_ok it’s a little on the nose but what if she really can help us??? bc i am really invested in fixing this issue if for no other reason than apparently you’re not going 2 have sex w me until we do_

**_great, then let’s go to a neurologist. or a therapist. or both._ **

“Sure, let’s go see a fucking _neurologist_ , Shane,” Ryan snaps. “You want to put it on your insurance? Because I haven’t hit my deductible yet and I’m not shelling out $1800 for a brain scan to tell us there isn’t anything wrong because _this isn’t PTSD._ ”

Sara and Jen stop talking. They both look over at Shane and Ryan, eyebrows raised.

“We fell off a cliff,” Shane explains, waving a hand. “It’s been a whole thing.”

“Sure, that checks out,” says Jen.

**_whatever. we’ll go see your fake witch, and when it doesn’t work we’re going halfsies on real medical expertise._ **

_fine_

**_fine_ **

_fine_

**_fine_ **

Shane exes out of the chat box and refuses to reopen it, even when Ryan elbows him.

—

They eat lunch at one of the picnic tables outside, still sniping at each other, but it’s hard to stay irritated when he is also forced by dint of the curse to be tender, to touch Ryan carefully and constantly. Shane feels vaguely irritated, but also inordinately fond, as he stretches his feet out away from the picnic table and leans his elbow on Ryan’s lap. Ryan is sitting on the tabletop, so his knees are at perfect resting height for Shane.

“Nobody seems surprised,” Ryan muses, in the tone of voice that suggests he’s tired of being annoyed and is ready to forget that they’re fighting. “About us, I mean.”

“We’re not acting any different,” Shane points out through a mouthful of hotdog. “Teej and them said they wouldn’t tell anyone, and it’s not like we’re making out on the lawn.”

“Yeah, but ... I dunno, I thought — I kind of thought we’d walk into the office and people would just like, _know._ ”

Shane raises his eyebrows. “Know what?”

Ryan shrugs. He doesn’t quite meet Shane’s eyes as he mumbles, “That — I don’t know, dude, that we like ... kiss, now. It just feels like a kind of momentous thing for people to not pick up on.”

Shane tries to keep an expression from crossing his face at Ryan calling them _momentous_ , but he fails miserably, if the way Ryan grins at him is any indication. “Nobody is ever paying as much attention to you as you think they are,” Shane tells him.

Ryan pushes gently at his head, huffing. “Yeah yeah,” he mumbles. “Thanks for the pep talk, Yogi Madej.”

Shane leans his head back and closes his eyes. The sun is warm and bright and Ryan is still and comfortable beneath him. His irritation has melted away, easy and quick, and suddenly he’s so filled with fondness for Ryan’s stupid face that he pushes up onto the tabletop and plants a kiss on Ryan’s cheek.

Ryan has always been someone who communicates best through touch, and Shane — isn’t, but he can try to be, because ... well, because blah blah relationships blah compromise blah, basically. It just seems easier to show him than to say it.

Ryan startles. Someone wolf-whistles, but Shane doesn’t see who.

“What are you doing?” Ryan asks. He doesn’t sound mad, and isn’t looking around nervously to see who’s noticed them. “I thought we were moving slowly until we got the whole curse thing solved.”

“First of all, it’s not a curse,” Shane reminds him with mock patience. “Secondly, kissing your cheek isn’t exactly fast-tracking things.”

Ryan’s smile is slow, but spreads quickly. “If we fix the curse — shut up! shut up — and don’t want to kiss each other anymore, people are going to know,” he points out. “They’re going to know we, like, broke up, or whatever.”

Shane nods. “Yeah,” he agrees, and kisses Ryan’s temple, then his nose, then the corner of his eye. “I know. That kind of seems like it’ll be the least of my problems if we finish therapy and discover that wanting to make out was a trauma coping mechanism.”

“Awww,” coos Ryan, doing that thing where he’s smiling so much he can’t cover his teeth when he speaks. “Shane.”

“Shut up,” Shane says, and pushes off the tabletop. This _Shane_ sounds different from Ryan’s other _Shane_ s, sounds tired and amused and fond, sounds like _I guess we’ll have to make sure you don’t lose it._

He thinks he’s getting better at hearing what Ryan is always trying to say, maybe. It’s preposterous to think that he really can hear Ryan’s voice in his head, but it’s entirely possible that it’s his brain’s way of processing a new understanding he didn’t have before.

They’re charged up enough that Shane could let go, if he wanted to; he could go inside and finish some work and work on his own projects, _Ruining History_ season two or even the hotdoga, but —

But he doesn’t want to. He stays where he is.

—

The weeks pass quickly.

They figure out how to maneuver throughout the day, to keep touching without being obvious; sometimes it’s a matter of Shane stretching his long legs under a table to press against Ryan’s calf during staff meetings, sometimes it’s sitting next to one another so that they’re constantly jostling one another; sometimes Shane gets tired of being creative and subtle and just takes Ryan’s hand, holding it in his own in his  lap.

In the mornings, Ryan brushes his teeth and pushes Shane up against the kitchen counter and kisses him long enough that they can separate to shower, shave, and use the toilet without crowding each other in the bathroom. Shane always hears a sleepy jumble of things, not usually coherent enough to be complete thoughts, just snatches: _morning tired shane coffee nice sun nice shane nice shane_.

Ryan’s shirts start to migrate to Shane’s closet. His shoes collect by the door. They go grocery shopping and buy disgusting protein powder that Ryan puts in his shakes. For the first few days, Ryan doesn’t try to exercise; on Wednesday, he drags Shane out for a run, but holding hands while running is a nightmare and anyway their steps don’t line up, and Shane is slow and Ryan wants to do intervals, and they end up snapping waspishly at each other until Shane gives up, grabs a fistful of Ryan’s stupid t-shirt and kisses him against a stop sign, kisses him and kisses him and kisses him, ignoring the honking cars and the wobble of the signpole. He kisses him until Ryan’s thoughts shift from _fuck you FUCK you you’re so FUCKING IRRITATING_ to a kind of pleasant hazy mumbling, _oh,_ and _hello_ , and _nice good idea very good idea well done shane, this is better than fighting this is better than running this is better than almost anything else that i can think of._

Then Shane stands at the intersection as Ryan does sprints from one end of the block and back. Shane takes to bringing orange wedges for Ryan to grab every time he passes, like a soccer mom with a particularly clingy kid.

Shane —

Well, he gets used to it.

He gets used to waking up to Ryan snoring next to him. He gets used to reaching out for Ryan like a touchstone, to being reached for. He gets used to Ryan in his head, imagined or not.

He gets used to it and he forgets that it isn’t forever and then he and Ryan are standing outside a run-down duplex with a nicely kept garden outside it, and some woman in a black lace romper is staring at them as she says, “Yeah, man. Holy shit. You got ghosts.”

—

Desdemona chooses not to elaborate on most of her practice. She sits Ryan and Shane down in her living room, which has no chairs or furniture except a wooden swing which hangs from the ceiling and a lot of potted plants.

“Can you see the ghosts?” Ryan asks, and to his credit sounds somewhat skeptical.

Desdemona hands them both tea they didn't ask for and then grabs a mug for herself. “No, ghosts are rarely corporeal in any meaningful sense,” she says, as if this were a scientific thing that everyone was supposed to already know. “It’s more of an aura.”

“Did you hear that, Ryan?” Shane asks, unable to help himself. “We have a ghostly aura.”

“Shut up, Shane,” Ryan says.

Desdemona gives Shane a long, slow blink. “You don’t believe,” she deduces, very astutely. “Despite the fact that you are feeling the effects of their presence?”

“I believe that I am feeling the effects of a traumatized brain,” Shane says. “No offense.”

She shrugs. “It’s your curse, not mine,” she tells him. “Anyway, at the end of the day it doesn’t matter what you believe. It matters what you experience.”

“So how to we break it?” Ryan asks. “Do we have to like, apologize to the ghost or something?”

Desdemona hums. She closes her eyes and holds up a hand, moving it around Ryan’s face as if she’s feeling the air around it. “Interesting,” she says. “I don’t sense malice, exactly. It feels more ... hm. The word I am getting is _scolding._ ”

“We’re getting scolded by ghosts?” Ryan asks.

“I guess ghosts are into corporal punishment,” Shane says. “Bit draconian, but sure.”

Desdemona and Ryan give him identical glares. He holds have hands up in a surrendering gesture.

“What happened before the curse took effect?” Desdemona asks. “Anything of note?”

Ryan nods. “We were fighting. Pretty intensely.” He glances at Shane, and gives his hand a squeeze.

Shane squeezes back, wincing. He doesn’t love having this conversation with a stranger trying to scam them, but it’s important to Ryan, and he figures when they go to a therapist he’ll get good person brownie points for having gone along with Ryan’s idea first.

Desdemona nods, looking thoughtful, and taps her nail against the side of her teacup. Her nails are black but there are sparkles on them. Shane’s not saying that books should be judged by their covers alone but also, covers are designed specifically for people to judge books by, so ...

“So you said in your message that you both experience excruciating pain when you’re not touching?” she prompts. “Can you show me?”

Ryan shakes his head, instinctively pulling Shane a little closer. “We’ve figured out that it works kind of like a battery?” he asks. “If we touch a lot, we kind of — charge up, and can separate for a while. I’ve been trying to work out the like, ratio —  so far the longest we’ve been able to go is half an hour but we were still in the same apartment so I don’t know if that helped, like if it would run down faster if we were farther away?”

“Interesting,” Desdemona murmurs. “Yeah — I wonder whether distance runs it down faster, the way using apps on your phone drains the battery.”

“Exactly, exactly. Oh man, it’s so weird to like, say it out loud, it sounds so fucking crazy — ”

“It sounds like it sucks but it’s kind of dope, too. I’ve never seen something this strong. Y’all must have really fucked off this ghost.”

“Yeah,” Ryan agrees. “Apparently. I mean, I personally think it was two ghosts actually, this couple that died in the area. Shane doesn’t think it’s any ghost at all, but one cool thing about the curse is that I can kind of see into his head when we kiss, so — ”

Ryan’s mouth snaps shut.

Shane blinks.

“You what,” he says.

Ryan glances at Desdemona, then at Shane, then down at his lap. He brings a sheepish hand up to the back of his neck. “Uh. Sorry. Sorry, I should have — okay, I should have said something earlier, probably.”

Shane pulls his hand away.

 _You haven’t told him that you can hear him_ , his brain points out, reasonably. _It’s not really fair to be mad._

“I’m not mad,” Shane answers himself out loud.

He isn’t. He’s —

He feels —

“What are you?” Ryan asks carefully.

Maybe he isn’t crazy. Maybe he is hearing Ryan’s real thoughts in his real head. Maybe Ryan knows every stupid, ugly thing about Shane that he does his best to hide in the darker corners of his brain. Maybe Ryan thinks he wants Shane because he has apparently been walking around in Shane’s brain, and gotten lost. Maybe ghosts are real. Maybe ghosts aren’t, and they’re both really, genuinely going insane.

“Shane,” Ryan says.

“Please don’t say my name like that,” Shane answers, because he can hear it now, all the shades, all the things that Ryan is trying to say, and it’s ...

Shane closes his eyes.

Panicked. That’s the word, he thinks, almost distantly: Shane is panicked. Shane feels like Ryan in the Sallie House, the flashlight flicking on and off and on again.

“I’m not mad,” he says again. “It’s fine. It’s fine.”

Ryan reaches back for his hand, and he pulls away by instinct, then winces at the look on Ryan’s face. He wants — God, for the first time in weeks he just wants to be _alone_ , for one second. He wants to be behind a closed door, in private, somewhere that he can — that no one is _watching_ , that no one is poking around in rooms of his brain he isn’t ready to show them.

He just needs a second to think without Ryan _looking at him._

“Dude, it doesn’t sound fine,” Ryan tells him. “You look — are you going to pass out? You’re really pale.”

Shane doesn’t have a door to hid behind, so he does the next best thing and arranges his face into a kind of vague smile. He gives Ryan back his hand. “It’s fine,” he says again. “Sorry, I was — startled. This is very spooky stuff, Bergara.”

“Have some more tea,” Desdemona urges him. “It’s calming.”

Shane drinks obediently.

It _is_ calming, actually, which is irritating.

He raises the cup in a grateful salute. “So how do we get rid of the curse?” he asks, without looking at Ryan, who is glaring at him. But Shane can’t — he can’t, right now. He doesn’t know what he’s feeling and he can’t work through it in — in _public_ , much less in front of Ryan, who will ... see it. Who will _know_ , apparently.

Desdemona shrugs. “Honestly, it’s hard to say, without the ghosts actually being here. But I think — the fact that you can charge up seems to me this is more of a lesson thing than a punishment thing. So I can give you some sage and some stuff to cleanse with, but since you don’t believe in any of it, I can’t promise it will work.”

“Neat,” Shane says, like an asshole.

“ _Shane_ ,” Ryan hisses.

“ _Ryan_ ,” Shane hisses back, and he _is_ mad, actually, it turns out. Because Ryan has been poking around where he wasn’t invited, looking at things Shane hadn't agreed to show him, things that are ugly, things that are — that could make him not _want_  —

Ryan had agreed that they should set boundaries and take it slow and work things through and it turns out he was lying the whole time, hanging out in Shane’s brain and — and opening doors that he’d explicitly written KEEP OUT on.

There are rooms in Shane’s brain that _Shane_ doesn’t even go into, and here it turns out Ryan has been upending all the furniture and breaking all the locks.

What Shane is: burgled, broken into, _exposed._

“You get the sage, or the magic powder, or whatever-the-fuck. I’m — ”

He closes his mouth around _out of here_ , because Shane _can’t_ be out of here. Some really fucking irritating ghosts have made _out of here_ impossible, unless Ryan goes with him, which defeats the whole point.

He goes and stands by the door, arms crossed.

“Very mature,” Ryan tells him. “You’re acting real grown up right now, dude.”

“Read my mind, Ryan,” Shane answers. He thinks _fuck you_ as hard as he can. “Go on, what am I thinking right now?”

“More tea?” asks Desdemona placidly. “Something to snack on while I bind the sage?”

Shane turns and faces the door, because he’s going to maybe commit a murder if he has to look at Ryan’s face for one more second. Ryan collects the sage from Desdemona, who wisely doesn’t try to say anything to Shane; when he gets to the door, he holds his hand out and waits.

Shane is mad at him. Shane is _so mad at him._

Shane takes his hand.

—

“You can’t ignore me forever,” Ryan points out, back at the apartment.

He is right about this, which Shane thinks is stupid. The problem is that Shane needs to go somewhere and calm down, but he can’t, because every time he tries to pull away the curse flares up, like it knows.

“Shane, come on. _Talk_ to me.”

Shane pinches the bridge of his nose. “I _don’t want to_ ,” he snaps. “I want to be _alone_ , man.”

“Well, you can’t be,” Ryan snaps back. “I’m not always thrilled about it either, but you can’t be alone, and you being stuck here and, and _ignoring me_ fucking sucks, so how about we fucking — figure it out?”

“Why don’t you just take a stroll through my brain and figure it out for me?” Shane asks, unable to stop himself.

 _Calm down_ , he tells himself, but Ryan is still right there, still touching him, _always touching him_ , and Shane — can’t. He just can’t. He is so desperate to go somewhere that he can get just a little bit of fucking privacy, so his brain can whir in peace, so he can work things through and figure out what he’s feeling and what he thinks about what he’s feeling and what to do about what he thinks about what he’s feeling, and —

And he can’t, because Ryan is right there, staring at him.

“Why are you mad at _me?_ ” Ryan sputters. “ _I_ didn’t do this! I didn’t ask for this! This is not my fucking fault!”

“I _know_ ,” Shane says. “Ryan! I fucking know that! I am feeling a lot of irrational things! I don’t know what to tell you!”

Ryan throws his free hand up, waving it like a crazy person. “Tell me _what the feelings are_ , oh my God, it’s not that hard! It’s how relationships work! You talk about things!”

“I can’t talk about it if I don’t _know_ what it _is_!” Shane yells. “I’m not like you, Ryan, I don’t have all my feelings just — bubbling to the fucking surface all the time, okay, it’s more complicated for me!”

Ryan looks distinctly unimpressed. “Yeah, you’re _soooo deep_ , dude,” he says flatly. “Sorry I’m not as _complicated_ as you, what the fuck?”

“No, I’m not — _no_ , that’s not what I’m trying to say.” Shane pinches the bridge of his nose. He tries taking some deep breaths. It doesn’t help. “I’m — what I’m _saying_ is that I can’t talk about my feelings with you because I don’t fucking know what my feelings are and you being here is making them more confused, anyway, but mostly what I feel is really fucking — exposed, and I hate it, and I hate that you were — invading my privacy — _don’t_ , I _know_ it’s not your fault, that doesn’t _help_.”

“It’s not like it’s — they’re just _feelings_ ,” Ryan tells him. “When I said I could see your brain, I just meant — it’s not like, I’m not reading your mind exactly, it’s just ... seeing into things, I guess, it’s more vague, it’s just feeling like I’m seeing things from your point of view, kind of, so I can — fuck, I don’t know, understand you better.”

 _That's the problem_ , Shane thinks.  _You might not like what you find._

“Okay,” Shane says. “Sure. The problem is that I didn’t say — I didn’t say you could _do that._ I should be allowed to decide when you know things and — and how you know them. You don’t get to just _rummage around_.”

“Oh for the love of God, your thoughts aren’t that fucking special,” Ryan tells him. “You — what’s the big secret, Shane? That you don’t think I love you? That you’re determined to be a fucking martyr all the time? That you’re so fucking afraid of experiencing a negative fucking emotion that you just prefer not to experience any of them at all? Well! Surprise! I already know! I probably didn’t need a magic curse to be able to figure it out!”

Shane stares at him. Ryan glares back.

“Fuck you, I’m going to bed,” he announces.

Shane says, “Ryan, it’s four o’clock in the afternoon.”

“Well I guess it’ll be a long fucking night,” Ryan snaps. “You stay out here. Don’t — you want your privacy, well here you go, pal.”

Shane feels something small and helpless and twisting in his stomach. Ryan drops his hand, pushes past him, and slams the door to Shane’s own goddamn bedroom. Shane has been exiled to the couch in his apartment by someone who doesn’t even live there.

“Fuck ghosts,” Shane says, out loud.

He can’t get much farther than the window without his hands starting to tingle, and every time they do Ryan throws something at the door — Shane thinks it might be his shoes — so he’s mostly stuck sitting on the couch, staring at the wall and spiraling. 

He can’t quite hold on to any one thought; it’s just a smooth wall of bad feeling, of being mad at Ryan but not really at _Ryan_ ; he’s mad at himself for being mad when he knows it’s hypocritical and unfair, mad at ghosts for not being real and still managing to fuck with his life anyway, mad at his brain for not being able to parse quickly that what he is isn’t mad at all.

It’s scared.

Shane is so fucking terrified that Ryan will map all the hallways of his brain and decide it's too much of a fixer-upper. That the it isn't worth the investment. Shane puts a lot of work into having a nice facade but — but he knows what his brain is like. He knows how impossible it can be to navigate, and how Ryan does, too. 

At this thought, Shane gets up and goes to the bathroom. He’s got some old sleeping pills behind the mirror, so he pops a couple and stretches out on the couch. Maybe things will look better in the morning, and even if they don’t, at least he’ll have managed to throw a few terrible hours into the garbage without having to deal with them.

On the way back to the couch, he picks up the bag with the sage in it. Desdemona had given them instructions, written neatly on a little card. _This is a smudge stick_ , the card says. _Light it on fire so the ends are smoldering, and use it to cleanse the atmosphere of the apartment by smudging out the ill-will._

“Okay, these are _not_ clear instructions,” Shane mutters. Still, he lights one end of the smudge stick and then just kind of ... waves it around, a little.

This is stupid, and probably won’t work, but he supposes it can’t hurt to try. His bedroom has been quiet for a while. Maybe Ryan is sleeping. Maybe Ryan isn’t.

Shane wonders, as he sinks into sleep, whether the ghosts know he hates them.

—

_Shane is back at the Grand Canyon. He’s sitting on the same cliff they fell off, but it doesn’t look so very far down, now. Ryan isn’t anywhere to be seen. The air is soft and sweet against his cheek, the Canyon huge and purpled and echoing. It’s nice, actually. He hadn’t noticed how nice it was the last time he was here, too busy being careful to stay out of Ryan’s space and not seem obvious about it on camera._

_A tourist coming along the trail spots him and heads his way. She lowers herself next to him, both of them looking out into the Canyon, and then says, “It’s nice in this light, isn’t it?”_

_“Yeah,” Shane says. He studies her profile: very short hair, sticky against her cheek; a round nose; straight eyebrows. She’s wearing a puffy jacket, too heavy for the season, oddly familiar. It clicks: “Bessie Hyde?”_

_She shrugs. “Not really,” she tells him. “Kind of. I look like her because it’s how human brains process things, but no, I’m not literally Bessie Hyde. Maybe I was once, or partly was, or Bessie Hyde contributed to what I am. It’s hard to say.”_

_“So — ghosts aren’t real,” Shane clarifies._

_Not-Bessie-Hyde gives him a look. “I don’t really have time to get into it,” she tells him. “No, ghosts aren’t real in the way that your Ryan thinks they are. They’re also not NOT real in the way that you think they aren’t.”_

_“But you did push us off a cliff?”_

_“But I did push you off a cliff.”_

_“Why?”_

_Not-Bessie-Hyde hums. She kicks her feet out against the edge of the cliff and leans back, the sun on her face. “Humans make things so complicated,” she muses. “At the end of the day, things are and are not; it doesn’t really matter what you believe.”_

_Shane frowns. “What is that supposed to mean?” he asks._

_“It means that you don’t have to believe someone loves you to make it true,” Not-Bessie-Hyde tells him. “It means that you can filter the world through a thousand different lenses, but it is still only the world. Even this — this dream, me appearing as Bessie Hyde, us having this conversation, it is just a lense. It is just the only way your brain knows how to process what is happening to you.”_

_Shane tries and fails not to say: “So you’re_ not _really here, and this really_ is _my brain processing trauma.”_

_“Shane,” says Not-Bessie-Hyde, not unkindly, “this is why I pushed you off a cliff.”_

_“That’s fair,” Shane concedes._

_They look together out at the Canyon. Shane thinks about lenses, and love, and Bessie Hyde maybe dying out on that river, all those years ago. He thinks about how close he and Ryan came to falling all the way down._

_He thinks and thinks and thinks and thinks and then realizes he isn’t thinking at all; he’s just remembering, conjuring Ryan’s face because he can, and it pleases him. He likes to look at Ryan, to listen to him, to make him laugh._

_Not-Bessie-Hyde stands, brushing dirt off her hands as she does. “If Ryan asks, say it was the sage,” she advises him. “Desdemona is mostly but not entirely full of shit.”_

_Shane nods. “Hey, one last thing,” he says. “Did Bessie Hyde kill her husband?”_

_Not-Bessie-Hyde smiles at him. “I am not enough Bessie Hyde to remember,” she says, “I guess that will just have to remain unsolved.”_

—

Shane wakes up just before the sun finishes rising. He blinks a few times; the room still smells pleasantly of burnt sage, sunlight spilling across the floor. He walks all the way to the window and his hands don’t tingle. He leaves the apartment and goes down to the sidewalk and his hands don’t tingle.

He could leave. He could cut his losses. He could decide it's better and safer and smarter just to stay friends.

Shane is very tired of doing the better and safer and smarter thing. In this extended house metaphor, he just wants to open a fucking window and climb out.

Shane buys pancakes and eggs and bacon at the diner on the corner and brings it back to the apartment. He makes coffee as quietly as he can, pours it into two mugs, plates everything, and carries it into the bedroom.

Ryan is awake, which is not all that surprising, all things being equal. He did go to sleep at like five pm.

“I’m sorry,” Shane says, before Ryan can say anything, and Ryan’s mouth snaps shut. He waits. “I’m sorry that I was mad, and that I was an asshole about being mad. It _is_ harder for me to know what I’m feeling than it is for you, not because I’m more complicated but because I’m just — not as good at it. You have to be patient with me.”

He brings the breakfast to bed and sets it down carefully. Ryan picks up the coffee mug and takes a long sip. He smiles a little. “Just right,” he says.

“I pay attention,” Shane tells him.

“I know.” Ryan hesitates, cutting his eyes to Shane and then away again. “Look — it was a shortcut, admittedly, the brain thing. But I’d have _figured it out_ , Shane. You’re my best friend. I’m not _stupid._ ”

Shane nods, running his finger around the rim of his own coffee mug. “Yeah, I know. That’s — Ryan, the problem is that I know that. I always knew you’d figure out that I was — that I _am_ ... ”

“C’mon, buddy,” Ryan murmurs. “You can do it.”

“Shut up,” Shane laughs. He swallows, and blows out a long breath. “I’m in love with you, and I knew that you’d know, eventually. But I just got so used to — burying it, whatever, that ... the idea that you knew, that you knew but I hadn’t _told you_ , just ... really fucked me up, man.” He shrugs. “I’m not — an expressive person. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m pretty, uh. Midwestern, emotionally.”

“Don’t play like Midwesterners aren’t emotional,” Ryan teases him gently. “I’ve met your mom. She’s a waterpark.”

Shane laughs again. “ _Please_ leave my mom out of this conversation,” he begs, and then sobers. “I wanted to take it slow because I was afraid I’d get used to having you and then I’d lose you when the curse was gone. I was ... I  _am_ really — scared. That you'll, fuck, I don't know, decide it was a mistake, that I'm too much work, and bail. But — that wasn’t fair. That's not you, that's not who you are, it's just — the worst thing I can imagine. But you said it wasn’t the curse and I should have trusted you to know your own feelings.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“It’s easier to want something than to have it,” Shane says, like he’s ripping off a band-aid. “But I don’t — Ryan, I don’t care if it’s hard and I don’t care if it goes bad and I don’t care if it tanks both of our careers. I honestly just don’t give a shit, man. I want — I really want to just ...” He shrugs, a little helpless. “I don’t know. Love you, I guess. Whatever.”  

Ryan is looking at him with all the warmth in the world in his eyes. He’s smiling so brightly that Shane could light his whole apartment with it.

“Shane,” Ryan says, and Shane hears every nuance of it, every ounce of feeling that it can carry.

He’s feeling so many things at one time that it would be impossible to parse it all. Instead of trying, he leans forward and nudges Ryan’s nose and says everything all at once: “ _Ryan_.”

—

“You said it was a ghost,” Ryan points out later, languid and relaxed and with a tiny bit of bacon in his hair. “I heard you. And I smelled the sage.”

Shane heaves a long sigh. “Desdemona is mostly, but not entirely, full of shit,” he admits. “Do you want to go back to your place and — I don’t know, be alone? I think we can, now.”

Ryan grins up at him. “No,” he says. “I’m happy where I am.”

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ugh, they're so embarrassing.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It takes Ryan a little while to realize that he’s moved into Shane’s apartment. Or — no, maybe it’s better to say that it takes Ryan a little while to realize that he never moved _out_ of Shane’s apartment; that the slow migration of his clothes from one house to the other only went one direction, that all his new favorite running routes start at Shane’s front door. It’s not until they agree to let the Pero Like crew film in their apartment that he realizes it is, in fact, _their apartment_.  
> 
> Complete! Can you believe??

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AHHHH. it's done now! enjoy the very goopy and only mildly sexy sex. mostly thank you to all of you for your very sweet feedback. not-bessie-hyde and i are both pleased as punch with how things turned out. <3

It takes Ryan a little while to realize that he’s moved into Shane’s apartment. Or — no, maybe it’s better to say that it takes Ryan a little while to realize that he never moved _out_ of Shane’s apartment; that the slow migration of his clothes from one house to the other only went one direction, that all his new favorite running routes start at Shane’s front door. It’s not until they agree to let the Pero Like crew film in their apartment that he realizes it is, in fact, _their apartment_.  

“Holy shit, I should be paying rent,” Ryan realizes, out loud, earning a look from Curly that he knows he’s going to have to deal with later.

Shane chuckles beside him, reaching out a hand to squeeze lightly the back of his neck. “Don’t break your lease,” he says. “You’ve only got a few months left. It’s fine.”

Ryan frowns. “Wait, did you know about this?” he asks.

“Know about what?”

“That we’re living together!” Ryan sputters, gesturing around the apartment like it should be obvious. “Look! That’s my — that’s my high school _yearbook_ , when did that even _get_ here? When did that even leave my mom’s house?”

Shane is looking at him with an expression that Ryan has become familiar with over the course of the past few months: bewildered and fond, like Ryan is something delightful from an unlabeled chocolate box. “Ryan, we went furniture shopping together _last week_ ,” he reminds him gently. “You said, and I quote, ‘Any couch long enough for your Sasquatch legs is too big to fit in our living room.’”

“Well, yeah,” Ryan mutters, “but I just meant that, like — jokingly.”

“Do you ... _not_ want to live together?” Shane asks, eyebrows rising. He doesn’t look concerned, exactly, but like maybe he’s gearing up to have a deeper conversation than the one he’d thought they were having.

Ryan is getting better, at seeing. He’s getting better at being able to read the microexpressions on Shane’s face, passing by sometimes so fast that he’s not even sure Shane himself has clocked the feeling. Sometimes he still has to ask for clarification, and Shane — however much he whines about it — is also getting better at thinking it through, out loud.

Ryan doesn’t think he’ll ever _stop_ overthinking, but at least they’re at a point where he’s doing it in a way that includes Ryan in the process.

Ryan gives him a look. “What? Shut up,” he says. “Of course I want to live together, dude. I’m just saying I’d have liked to have been made aware of it when it was happening.”

“ _You_ moved in with _me_ ,” Shane points out. “Shouldn’t this conversation be going the other direction?”

“You got problems,” Curly informs them, sounding extremely unimpressed. “Now get out of my light.”

They leave them to film with instructions to put the keys under the doormat. Ryan is feeling kind of cheated, because he missed what he thinks probably should have been a big moment. They could have thrown a housewarming party. They _definitely_ could have boned it out. Ryan thinks there are some after-effects of the curse that make things — light up, kind of, when they’re touching, when they’re touching and feeling things at the same time.

 _No, Ryan,_ Shane always tells him. _That’s just what it feels like, because ghosts aren’t real._

Shane says the most romantic shit in the least romantic ways, and sometimes Ryan loves him so much that he’s a little distressed about it.

—

Ryan brings it up again a few days later, the two of them in the too-small kitchen, bitching cheerfully at one another for being in the way. Ryan is extremely useless at cooking, and if he had it his way he’d just eat out all the time, but Shane has recently been getting into meal delivery boxes, insistent that being “almost mid-thirties” means he needs eat more vegetables.

“Dude, you’re basically a human bucket,” Ryan points out. “You could eat Kraft macaroni directly from the box and not gain any weight because there’s just too much surface area of you to distribute the calories.”

Shane rolls his eyes. “It’s not _vanity_ , Ryan, it’s _health concern_. When you get older you’ll understand.” Ryan gives him a dubious look, because Shane plays it off like he doesn’t care what his enormous sasquatch body looks like but Ryan knows how to look at him, now. He knows the difference between when Shane doesn’t care and when Shane is visibly and intentionally Not Caring.

“I’m still gonna wanna blow you even with a tummy,” Ryan tells him, instead of voicing his doubts. “Maybe I’ll wanna blow you even more, because it’ll be cute. It’ll be like a pillow made out of macaroni and cheese that’s just for me.”

“Pretty uncool of you to take a bunch of words I really like and arrange them in the worst way possible,” Shane tells him, but he’s grinning a little, obviously charmed. Ryan is getting better at seeing that, too, even when Shane doesn’t voice it, maybe can’t, maybe doesn’t even realize it’s what he’s feeling.

Ryan laughs. “Was it the macaroni and cheese pillow that got you?” he asks. “Or the idea of me blowing you out of gratitude for being an arbiter of comfy naps?”

Shane’s eyes get so wrinkled as he laughs that he has to step away from the stove. Ryan hoists himself up onto the counter and just takes a few second to delight in watching the scrunched delight of him.

“I’ll love you when you’re old and saggy and gross,” he announces, just to be soft, just to make Shane soft with him. “So you might as well get old and saggy and gross.”

Shane’s eyebrows rise, his mouth twitching. “Ryan,” he says, voice dry and tender at the same time.

“You should have told me I’d moved in with you,” Ryan tells him. “We just went through this whole thing with ghosts about how you don’t communicate.”

“No, we just went through a whole thing with an as-yet-uncategorized cosmic _thing_ about how _you_ can’t read a room,” Shane counters.

“An _as yet uncategorized_ — !” Ryan yelps, scandalized. “We were _pushed off a_ — ”

Shane cuts him off with a quick kiss, just a quick press before he returns to cooking. “Are you really this upset that you didn’t notice?” he asks. “In my defense, I genuinely thought you had. You did the moving. I thought — it seems like you should be responsible for knowing where you live, not me.”

“I’m not _upset_ ,” Ryan tells him, although he kind of is, but more about how Shane can’t admit they were visited by a ghost than about the fact that he moved addresses without noticing. “I’m ... disappointed that we missed out on the opportunity to be gross in front of our friends.”

“We can still have a housewarming,” Shane points out. “In this apartment, even, if you want. Or the next one. My lease is up next year; we could always get something bigger, once you’re not carrying your rent, too.”

Something big and warm and familiar fills Ryan up: Shane talking casually about living together, about _staying_ together, like it is an obvious thing, a foregone conclusion. “Yeah,” he agrees. “Yeah, we can just wait until we get an apartment with a balcony. That’ll show ’em.”

“A balcony?” Shane repeats. “In _this_ economy?”

“It’ll be a bunch of apartments from now,” Ryan says. “When you’re just a saggy old blob and I’m surgically attached to my walker. That’s when we’ll have the housewarming party and we’ll say: fuck you guys, look at this balcony.”

Shane turns off the stove and pulls his stir-fry from the burner, laughing. “It’ll be hard for you to show your gratitude for my macaroni and cheese pillow tummy by blowing me when your hands have become walking aids,” he points out. “What’ll we do then?”

“Figure it out,” Ryan promises with a shrug. “We’re enterprising dudes. We can make something work.”

He watches Shane grab two bowls from the cupboards; he’d moved all his dinnerware there not long ago, deciding it made more sense than where Shane had been keeping them, which was in the goddamn living room, because he’d been insistent that all his coffee materials needed to be above the stove, for some stupid reason. Now the coffee is where it belongs, which is in the bedroom, next to Ryan’s side of the bed, so they can wake up to fresh coffee.

Shane hands him a plate without asking. He’s made the stir-fry how Ryan likes it, a little overdone, with too much salt.

Ryan can’t believe that he hadn’t been able to see this, before. Shane has been showing him and showing him and showing him. He tries to say it now, to put it in words, but that’s just another way of showing: talking because he knows Ryan wants him to.

“Shane,” he says quietly, overwhelmed with it suddenly, putting the bowl aside.

Shane looks up, face concerned at Ryan’s tone. “What?”

“I love you,” Ryan says. “Do you ... you, uh. You know that, right?”

Shane’s eyes wrinkle. He puts his food aside, too, and comes to stand in the V of Ryan’s legs. “I know,” he says, smiling, hands coming up to frame Ryan’s face. “Ry. I know. You say it all the time.”

“Yeah, but —” Ryan’s voice catches in his throat suddenly. He thinks about falling over the edge and Shane holding onto him anyway, despite knowing he’d go down too. “But do you know that I — how much — ”

“Ryan,” Shane interrupts gently, and waits.

He says “Ryan,” like _I love you._ “Ryan,” like _This part of you is precious to me_. “Ryan,” like _All parts of you are precious to me._

“Ryan,” like he already knows the answer and doesn’t need to hear Ryan say it.

Instead of answering, Ryan pushes forward and kisses him. There aren’t any magic tricks: no seeing into anybody’s brain, no hearing anybody’s thoughts. All he gets is all he wants, which is the soft press of Shane’s mouth, the swallow of the surprising sound he makes; he gets Shane’s hands tightening around his face and sliding back to cup his head; he gets the stupid way that Shane’s heart reacts to him, the skip of the beating in his chest that settles only once Ryan has pressed his hand to it.

Ryan doesn’t need ghosts: he has Shane, real, alive, solid, and here, beneath his palms.

Ryan presses in further, suddenly hungry, suddenly desperate: he drags his hand down Shane’s shirt and starts fiddling with his belt buckle, not quite coordinated enough to manage it with one hand. He’s not willing to give up kissing to actually look at what he needs to do, so he just makes an irritated sound that makes Shane laugh against his mouth.

“Okay,” Shane mumbles, not pulling back. He brings his hands down from behind Ryan’s head and bats Ryan’s fingers out of the way so he can undo the belt, zipper, and button; he lets Ryan do the work of shoving them down enough that he can get his hand inside, at first just a press of his hand against the outside of Shane’s boxers, cupping around his hardening dick. “There’s food out,” Shane murmurs. “This is really unhygenic.”

“Good,” Ryan answers, not caring. “We can have Chipotle like I wanted.”

Shane draws back, outraged. “If this is your way of telling me my stir-fry isn’t better than a restaurant that will _literally_ give you e.coli,” he begins, before Ryan gives his dick a light squeeze. “Nevermind, fuck my stir-fry, I love burritos,” Shane corrects.

Ryan laughs, and as a reward tucks two of his fingers into the lip of Shane’s boxers, dragging him flush up against the counter. It’s not the right height for them to be able to quite jack off together, but Ryan feels strangely relaxed about his own boner: mostly he’s feeling like he wants to put his mouth on whatever part of Shane he can reach, and pull an orgasm out of him right here, in the kitchen they share.

In _their apartment_.

Shane complies with Ryan’s directive to get closer, and folds his impossibly long arms around his shoulders, bent at the elbows and pressing them so close that their chests are touching. Ryan wants to be naked but is also oddly charmed by the rustle of their shirts, Shane’s Chicago t-shirt and ... Shane’s other Chicago t-shirt, because they are both wearing pieces from Shane’s hometown collection.

Ryan pulls Shane’s dick from his boxers and strokes it a few times, gentle, not trying to get him off but just — saying hello. He’s always really liked Shane’s dick, even though to be fair it’s the only one he’s ever been this closely acquainted with other than his own, and he’s inordinately fond of the guy attached to it. But it has a nice heft. He likes the weight of it. He likes the way Shane’s expression shatters open when he touches it, newly surprised every time by Ryan’s own delight.

He sucks a kiss to Shane’s jaw, to his neck, to the top of his shoulder. He slides his hand back to press his thumb lightly against Shane’s balls, pulls it back to be rewarded by just enough precome to use as the first swipe of lube.

“Shane,” he murmurs, and Shane says, “Yeah. Ryan. Yeah.”

It’s a weird angle that doesn’t feel great on Ryan’s wrist and Ryan could not give less of a shit, just keeps stroking, letting Shane pull him in closer and closer, letting Shane say his name. He keeps his pace the same, the exact same, even when Shane starts shifting beneath him, starts stuttering his hips in an attempt to get more, faster; he stays steady and firm and maddeningly sure, because he likes watching Shane need him and because he’s making a point.

“I’ll never — Ryan, come on, if you ever want Chipotle you have to — ”

“I’m okay,” Ryan answers, grinning. “I’m not that hungry. I could stay here all day.”

Shane gives him a look. “I swear to God, Ryan,” he warns.

“Swear to ghosts,” Ryan teases. “Then I’ll help.”

Shane studies him for a moment, like he’s thinking, like he’s weighing the pros and cons. Ryan tightens his grip a little, flicks his wrist. Shane hisses in a breath and says, “Fuck you. I swear to ghosts.”

Ryan throws his head back and laughs. He kisses Shane as hard as he can and speeds up until Shane bites out a soft soft sigh and comes all over his hand. Ryan hooks his ankles around Shane’s back and draws him in and holds on, even when Shane works his own hand between them, diving down into Ryan’s sweatpants and jerking him off with a sweet kind of urgency, mumbling literally meaningless nothings into the place where Ryan’s neck meets his shoulder.  

The only words Ryan quite catches are _i_ and _love_ and _you_ and his own name, over and over again, a litany, a promise, a prayer.

—

Ryan buys two cacti, one tall and skinny, one short and flowering. He puts them on their windowsill.

They both bloom.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> find me on [tumblr](https://itsvarnes.tumblr.com)!


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